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This show started promisingly.
First, the big cliffhanger (not) from last season about who got shot was quickly resolved. It was Jerry, who seemed very blubbery compared to some click-bait web sites which include Jorge Garcia as one of those celebrities who have lost a LOT of weight. The Muslim momma didn't have pretty good aim, that's for sure. I guess she hadn't spent a lot of time at the pistol range.
Of course, Jerry survived. Even though he does not appear around the table at the end of the opening credits, he is still in the show. The teaser for the show went on quite a long time, until 7:37 when the credits kicked in, and after that the usual listing of cast members, producers, etc., etc. at the bottom of the screen kept going until 13:42, about a quarter of the way through the show.
Junior and Tani did their usual cute number again, going to the opera which was not an "opera" like Wagner or Puccini or Verdi, but some Hawaiian "operetta" on local themes which will no doubt encourage the Hawaiian Film Office and Department of Taxation to keep those credits coming.
On seeing some guy with a sniper rifle up in the theatre's wings, I thought, "Hmmmm, this is going to be interesting, sort of like that Hitchcock film where an assassin knocks someone off during a classical concert." It wasn't as fancy as that, though some guy is shot fatally which leads to McGarrett abandoning a date he is having at a restaurant with a hot babe named Brooke (a divorced acquaintance of Danno's from his son's school, played by Katie Wee). At the theater, McGarrett joins the well-dressed Tani (who is in a slinky dress) and Junior, (both of whom are assigned to "crowd control"), to find the killer who hasn't left the theatre yet. McGarrett must keep a change of work clothes in his car, because he gets there very quickly.
The killer, who is later determined to be "military trained," manages to get away following some brain-bending stunts by both him and McGarrett. Danno, who now has a really horrible haircut described to me by a friend as a "fauxhawk," takes numerous shots at the guy, all of which miss, and then has the gall to tell McGarrett, "That's great, he got away." Back at the office, McGarrett tells Danno, "How about next time you get in the game? A little less chatting, a little more chasing."
The guy who got knocked off is Billy Sato, who is "the head of the triads," leading to the first WHAT?!? moment of the show, because "Sato" is a Japanese name and I think it EXTREMELY unlikely that a Japanese would be the boss of triads anywhere, considering they are an organized crime syndicate based in China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. Hello!
Sending a composite of the theatre shooter based on eyewitness descriptions and limited CCTV footage around gets results. A Veterans of Foreign Wars bar reports a woman came in asking about the guy, and Five-Zero is able to track her down via her cel phone number and McGarrett and Danno are soon in pursuit. When they finally corner her, she whips out a gun and identifies herself as Sergeant Quinn Liu from military police, also with CID (Criminal Investigation Division). As played by newcomer to the show Katrina Law, this character is one hot bitch (the character, of course, LOL). She IDs the shooter as Tom Kendall, "a veteran I booked for assault charges a few months ago. He's supposed to be checking in with me as a condition of getting his charges dropped, but he went MIA a couple days ago." She later says that Kendall is the second veteran to go MIA recently.
Kendall has carjacked a Doctor Gao at a hospital, forcing him to drive to some out-of-the-way location to get his wounds fixed up, but the doctor's car is tracked down by the usual vehicle recovery system information. When Five-Zero arrives where the doctor is, Kendall kills himself. Using Kendall's phone, McGarrett sends a text message to one of his contacts who Kendall was relying on for help, and the reply suggests that there are more hits planned.
The next scene is the next WHAT?!? moment. Adam goes to a meeting of yakuza bigshots to see if they might know why Billy Sato was knocked off (maybe because he had criminal connections and was Japanese, DUH!). This meeting was organized by Hajime Masuda (Sonny Saito), the local yakuza leader. You may recall that Adam was getting chummy with his daughter Tamiko in S09E22 and S09E25. When Adam arrives, Masuda wonders what Adam is up to, i.e., is he "doing it" with her, but Adam says "Tamiko and I have become close friends. I ... I assure you that's all she is."
Anyway, Adam, aside from being the son of corrupt business man Hiro Noshimuru who had heavy ties to the yakuza, is -- don't forget -- currently a cop working for the Five-Zero elite task force, and he talks to these yakuza dudes as if he is addressing the Board of Trade! I think this is a double-WHAT?!?
The gentlemen in the room suggest that none of them had anything to gain from taking out Sato, and his murder was likely something internal, a power play within the triad organization. Just then the doorbell ding-dongs and "Bitch" Quinn shows up with a warrant for Masuda. A gun battle between her and the yakuza in the room is quickly avoided thanks to Adam, who Liu does not yet know. When he shows her his Five-Zero ID, she tells him "You guys have been all up in my business today."
Liu shows Masuda some photos of him which she got from the room of Kendall's co-conspirator, a trained sniper named Marcus Sanders, which suggest that Masuda is a target. At the same time, Adam gets a call from Tani and Junior saying that based on various cel phone related information, Sanders is right outside the place in Kahala where this yap session with the yakuza is being held!
A huge firefight suddenly follows with members of the yakuza dropping like flies, and Liu is wounded. HPD cops including Duke show up, but Sanders escapes driving this GMC truck which is mounted on these massive tires like seen at monster truck shows. It crushes Liu's car to get out of Masuda's driveway, and soon after this, when McGarrett and Danno pursue the truck down the streets of Honolulu, it drives over and crushes about a dozen cars which are waiting in a lineup at a construction project. No doubt the show had a large budget to deal with these destroyed cars.
This whole business with the monster-like truck could be a WHAT?!? moment, except it is utterly absurd, bringing to mind the infamous "claw" which helped Wo Fat escape in S03E01.
First, when Liu drives up to Masuda's house just as Adam is being introduced to the "gang" (pun intended) inside, you can see that this truck is parked in the driveway right in front of the place! (At this point, we do not know that what we see from outside is Masuda's house, actually.) Don't you think that Liu would think there is something fishy about this huge truck? And why didn't Masuda's guards, who Masuda under fire nervously tells Adam and Liu "have [Sanders] outnumbered" (but are quickly becoming extinct) ... why didn't they take notice of it when Sanders parked it there? Really!
There are WWW sites devoted to these trucks. Some of them suggest because they are non-standard in various ways (like the headlights are not in the usual place) they are of questionable legality, though the cops often do not enforce laws against them. But we really have to ask: where did Sanders get this vehicle? At Honolulu Monster Truck Rental? Or did he steal it from a monster truck show somewhere? It is highly unlikely that he could afford to buy it, because the tires alone on these trucks cost thousands of dollars, as do the trucks themselves.
After this fracas and back at Five-Zero headquarters, where Liu, somehow having ingratiated herself into the Five-Zero team, is attending to her wound, Junior reports that an autopsy on Kendall revealed the presence of psilocybin, the compound produced from magic mushrooms, in his system. Liu reveals that Sanders was involved in a clinical trial at the VA hospital to treat post-traumatic stress using this substance, and it is speculated by Tani that maybe Kendall was also a participant. Liu says "Someone is recruiting snipers from within that study."
Further investigation by Five-Zero finds out that these recent killings were not part of some gang war. Instead "it was personal." As Adam, the resident yakuza expert, with the help of Grover, relates, "Back in the early '90s, before they were up-and-comers in their respective crime syndicates, Sato and Masuda worked as enforcers for a local loan shark named Isko Zhang (Roland Nip). A third man, Michael Lee, was part of the crew as well, serving as the point person responsible for brokering Zhang's loans. As enforcers for this loan shark, Masuda and Sato were in the business of collecting debts by any means necessary, whether it be bodily harm, breaking bones or worse. The loan shark, Zhang, is still alive and living on Oahu, but the other guy who was part of that crew, Michael Lee, he was killed two weeks ago. His body was found beaten and tortured just a few days after being released from a federal prison in Arizona. He had just served a 15-year sentence."
They figure that Lee, the front man for the loansharking, was tortured to reveal the names of the people behind the scenes -- Zhang, Sato and Masuda. McGarrett drives with Quinn at his usual breakneck speed and they arrive at Zhang's place where numerous bodyguards have already been knocked off by Sanders. McGarrett, who is no slouch in the ass-kicking department, has a great fight with Sanders, with the two of them flying off a balcony onto a glass table below, among other things. Quinn ends up killing Sanders, even though she would have preferred not to, because she was supposed to look after him and Kendall and she is sad that now they are both dead.
Meanwhile, Jerry, from his hospital bed, has been looking into possible connections with the psilocybin program at the hospital, and has found one particular person connected to the investigation, a real estate developer named Cullen (Rob Morrow) who Grover interviewed earlier in the show because it was Cullen's stolen car that was used by Kendall (which we now realize Cullen may have loaned to him).
Years ago, the short-of-cash Cullen had borrowed money from Lee (the front man for Zhang) which he was unable to repay when an investment tanked. Shortly after this, his car blew up in an explosion which was intended for him, but instead killed his wife and daughter. According to Quinn, Cullen has been waiting 15 years to exact revenge on Sato, Masuda and Zhang by torturing the recently-released Lee to drop a dime on his cohorts, and McGarrett concurs, saying, "That makes sense to me because what you have done recently is use your connections to the post-traumatic stress study that you financed [!!!] to recruit a couple of military-trained hitters. You turned them loose onto Lee to torture him and get the names of the accomplices." Nothing is specifically said about when Sanders and Kendall, who have been "missing" for a couple of days, may have gone to Arizona to get the information out of Lee. This business about Cullen financing the psilocybin program could also be a WHAT?!? moment, except it is just stupid, especially being pulled out of someone's ass like this at the last moment.
(Whether someone can be programmed to commit homicidal acts under the influence of psilocybin is another question, but I don't want to go there. One WWW page reports, "Entheogens like psilocybin, MDMA (ecstasy), LSD, and ayahuasca have received increasingly positive attention for their psychological benefits in treating conditions like PTSD or addiction, or even for general well-being. But a lot of their reported therapeutic effects happen in a clinical setting, with supervision by trained researchers.")
A scene follows at Kamekona's shrimp shack where a party is being arranged for Jerry, who just got out of the hospital. Jerry tearfully tells everyone, accompanied by sad music, "Look, joining Five-0 is the best thing that's ever happened to me. Not just because it gave me a job and a sense of purpose, but, well, 'cause it gave me ‘ohana. But having a close brush with death really makes you think about how you're living your life. And you realize how precious time is." The show concludes with a group hug, including Quinn, who has shown up on a motorcycle wearing her military camo garb for some strange reason.
The show ends with someone putting dynamite in the toolbox at McGarrett's house that he inherited from his father, which we have not seen for a VERY long time. Oh dear!! Another cliffhanger. Well, don't worry, I'm sure the powers that be who could make a spoiler out of a fart in Hurricane Dorian will be releasing little hints soon...
MORE TRIVIA:
- Roland Nip, who played Zhang, the money launderer, also appeared on the original Five-O in two episodes: See How She Runs (1977) and The Pagoda Factor (1978). It's a good question whether the mug shot of Zhang represents what he looks like now and whether he was made up for his appearance in the show or vice versa.
- When McGarrett and Liu are driving to Zhang's place at top speed, they have a funny exchange. She asks him, "Can't this thing go any faster?" McGarrett replies, "I've ... never had that complaint before.
- After Jerry is shot, the music is "As Long As I Live," by Jerry Lee Lewis. In the hospital, Jerry and Junior are playing the game of Battleship. Junior accuses Jerry of cheating. There is a "previously on" at the beginning of the show where someone (now discovered to be Jerry) was shot in last season's last show, but it was only 10 seconds long.
This was the second show in a row where a cliffhanger from the previous show was resolved in record time. After a one minute “previously on,” McGarrett figured out within 45 seconds thanks to Eddie’s barking that something was amiss in the garage where dynamite was placed in the "Champ box" (not seen since S04E17?), and called for the bomb squad.
McGarrett says that his money is on the explosives being connected with Wes Cullen, the bland villain played by Rob Morrow in the previous show whose case connected with the "programmed" veterans murdering people was abandoned by the prosecuting attorney who didn’t feel there was enough evidence for a conviction. This was not pursued in S10E02 either; it’s something for a future episode, I guess.
Anyway, this discussion now leads into the Crime of the Week, or, as I like to call it, the "absurdly complicated plot":
Two years before, the FBI busted Jackson Wilcox (Marc Menchaca), "the biggest distributor of methamphetamines west of the Mississippi," at his compound in middle-of-nowhere McGill, Nevada. It was reported Jackson was killed, but he was actually just injured and kept around to become a valuable asset to the FBI. Eventually, Jackson was taken to a safe location in Hawaii where only recently (like two years later?) he was being grilled about dropping a dime on various competing distributors in the drug trade, particularly those in Mexican cartels. Jackson has throat cancer, for which he has to be taken to the hospital periodically for treatment.
As a condition of his co-operation, Jackson's wife Shayla (Kate Tobia) has been brought to Hawaii three days before. She is in a safe house of her own. Presumably conjugal visits between the two of them are arranged, during which her husband whispers stuff about his schedule for his cancer treatments. However, Shayla is in cahoots with Jackson's brother Mike (Jason New), with whom she is having a torrid affair. She has been sending him naughty pictures of herself by "text message" on what seems like a surreptitious cell phone where you can only send messages, not make calls. This is hidden in a toilet bowl, unknown to the FBI, but why didn't the FBI check her for a cell phone when she first met them?
Mike also arrives in Hawaii a few days before with a couple of accomplices. Getting tipped off by Shayla (I guess, despite what seems like a very limited time frame) and knowing when Jackson is going to get treatment, they follow the van used to transport him to the hospital. This van has been "borrowed" from the Department of Defense by the FBI. When it is in the Kapahulu Tunnel, the bad guys let off a bomb which causes the ceiling of the tunnel to collapse. The rationale for this, McGarrett speculates, is "they've entombed the entire crime scene ... it could have been hours before anybody realized this prisoner was gone." The FBI guards in the van are killed.
Soon after this, Junior and Tani arrive on the scene. There is a lineup of cars outside the tunnel, and the two lovebirds, who have been spending time surfing, manage to get inside to help people. It should be pointed out that there is a real "Kapahulu Tunnel" on Oahu, but it leads to the park inside Diamond Head crater. In other words, it is a dead end, duh! (I can just imagine people in Hawaii laughing at some of the geographic stupidities in this show, similar to many on the old Five-O.)
The bad guys who have sprung Jackson are still in the tunnel (which in real life is about 580 feet long), and when confronted by Tani and Junior, they set off a couple more bombs which cause more chaos with the walls and ceiling. Jackson and the guys springing him all escape through the "emergency service exit" (how convenient). Why didn't they just set off the bombs inside that?
Tani and Junior are now stuck inside the tunnel along with several other people, and various rescue teams show up outside to try and deal with the situation. There are topographic questions about where the collapsed parts of the tunnel are located (it is "sealed off at both ends"). If the end where Tani and Junior entered was "sealed off," how could they get through to help people?
There are concerns that there is no air getting into the tunnel and everyone in there will die, but there is this huge vent on the ceiling to which we are oblivious for much of the show. As well, there is a tunnel that McGarrett's dog Eddie crawls through which would bring air in from the outside. Someone says "the fan [in the ceiling vent] was constantly filtering out carbon monoxide," but there is no carbon monoxide being generated because all of the cars in the tunnel are screwed! And how can this fan, which we can see as people are eventually hauled up inside the vent, "filter" out anything?
The scene inside the tunnel is kind of cliché-ridden, with people arguing about stuff and doing stupid things reminiscent of an Irwin Allen disaster movie like The Poseidon Adventure. Everyone is eventually taken out, even Eddie. But when Junior is being hoisted up, the rope, which has been shown fraying for the last several people, breaks, and Junior falls a long way which you think would produce very serious injuries when he hit the ground. Tani volunteers to go down and help him, because the combined weight of Junior and McGarrett would be too much. Junior seems quite OK at the end of the show.
Meanwhile, Jackson, along with Mike and his two men all go back to Jackson's safe house. They murder all of the FBI agents there except one who they take hostage to lead them to Shayla. I guess they don't know where she is or she never told her husband or they put a bag over her head while they were moving her around Honolulu or ... AUGH!
At Shayla's place, there is a shoot-out and the FBI men who are monitoring her there are also killed. One of Mike's two cohorts, a red-haired guy, is seriously wounded and left to die. Mike, Jackson, Shayla and the one member of Mike's gang left head to the He'eia State Forest to make their escape because there is a boat offshore somewhere nearby which is part of their "plan."
While they are in the forest, other associates of Mike show up and kill the one guy who helped spring Jackson from the van who was still left. Jackson figures out his brother's hot pants interest in Shayla, and before he runs off with Shayla, Mike shows his brother a huge bag of money he received from a Mexican gangster named Moreno, one of the people that Jackson had jerked around in the past.
Moreno is quick to arrive on the scene, seeking revenge on Jackson, and so does Five-Zero, having been tipped off by the red-haired guy. There is yet another firefight, with all the bad guys knocked off. Jackson kills Moreno, despite having zip-tie cuffs on his hands, and flees into the forest after his brother and wife. Later, Five-Zero finds Mike and Shayla dead and Jackson has at least a 20 minute lead on them. At the end of the show, Jackson is still missing, likely having taken the boat mentioned two paragraphs previously, suggesting this story will also be continued in a future episode.
From a production point of view, the show fell into the category of "sort of OK," with some interesting special effects like in the collapsed tunnel. However, the "beers on the beach" finale was dumb. The time this wasted could have been used to flesh out the crime of the week.
I did like the line McG gave to Danno at this gathering, who started bitching about a steak he wanted that was intended to reward Eddie. Danno was told to go and get himself a peanut butter sandwich! Earlier, Quinn also had a good line for Danno, who was amazed by how quickly she was able to find out who Jackson Wilcox was on her phone: "Apparently, this thing in my hand has something called the Internet, and I can pretty much access the entirety of all human knowledge."
However, the best quote of this episode was McGarrett’s: “It seems like a very slim window to create such an elaborate plan." Translation: For 41 minutes, we are going to be subjected to "the absurdly complicated plot."
MORE TRIVIA:
- The prisoner transport van used to move Wilcox to the hospital is "borrowed" from the Department of Defense, but this FBI operation is a big secret. Virtually all the information on the manifest connected with the operation has been blacked out. I think the only reason it was a DoD truck is so that McGarrett can contact Quinn, which of course appeals to her curiosity and gets her involved in the show. The way he is picking Quinn's brains for information about this van totally reminds me of the way that McGarrett used to do the same with Catherine.
- Danno and Adam meet the curious Quinn at the FBI "safe (not) house" from which Wilcox was extracted by his brother and his men. Danno says that the room Wilcox was in is "soundproof." While there does seem to be soundproofing on the wall, the door to this room is a sliding Japanese-style door called a shoji which has windows that look like paper (I think they are not paper in the show, though, they seem kind of glossy). These shoji doors are notorious for not being "soundproof"!
- There are a lot of WWW pages and articles on the web discussing whether a dog can be as multi-purpose as Eddie, i.e., sniffing bombs, drugs and people (see also review of the next episode). Alas, most people will not think about this, their eyes will glaze over when seeing Eddie just like seeing pictures of pussy cats and puppy dogs on Facebook.
- Considering Eddie was sitting around the house doing diddly-squat, why didn't he (especially considering he is a large dog) break the doors down in Super-SEAL McGarrett style and give the guy who was planting the bomb a good chewing? I'm surprised that Eddie didn't hear noise in the garage when the guy was originally there and started barking, which would probably have been enough to scare him off.
- Wilcox's plan after escaping was to go to the Maldives with his wife. I hope if she considered this, she brought her passport (but she was knocked off, so never mind).
- How did Moreno get to Honolulu? On a regular airline flight? Is this a failure of the TSA?
- In this show, Adam is "Mr. Exposition."
- Fred Helfing says that the "Kapahulu Tunnel" is the Diamond Head tunnel, though it looks like they did some 'photoshopping' on some of the painted street lines." However, if you look backwards from the area near the tunnel entrance, the road is quite different. Fred says, "I'm pretty certain that this road is just to the west of Battery Harlow on the North Flank of Diamond Head. It is not a road that leads to the tunnel. The building in the background is Hale Mohalu Hospital which cannot be seen from the Diamond Head entrance. The dirt in the background must have been placed there for the shooting because it is not there in Google Maps. There is no street view of this in Google Maps because it's not a public road." The "service" or "emergency" exit/entrance is probably here. This is seen in the Classic H50 episode S05E15 "Thanks For The Honeymoon" where Patty Duke witnesses Manolo commit a murder. The ventilation vent on top of the tunnel is purely fictional, in real life it would have to be a couple of hundred feet deep.
Dannoying is MIA for this episode, and the writers don't even bother coming up with excuses to explain this.
McGarrett gets Quinn (perhaps now known as Quinno) to rattle the cage of Wes Cullen (Rob Morrow), the shady real estate developer from S10E01 who purportedly funded a hospital study of veterans with PTSD being treated with psilocybin so he could use super-soldiers from this study to take vengeance on money launderers who jerked him around years ago (this crazy plot thread was painful to remember).
Considering charges against Cullen were dropped almost as soon as he was busted, Quinn, wearing a wire which McGarrett is listening to nearby, shows up while Cullen is having breakfast at some restaurant and attempts to intimidate him with a bunch of smart-alecky talk which doesn't work particularly well, though Cullen soon after this is seen making a phone call which is traced to a burner.
McGarrett and Quinn follow Cullen using McGarrett's huge, obvious red truck. This sequence was really laughable, making me wonder if this was an homage to the original Five-O series where this kind of close tailing was the norm.
Making it look like they abandon the tail, McGarrett and Quinn figure out where Cullen meets with some bad dude. The two of them hide behind some bushes nearby, and Quinn uses a camera with a telephoto lens to take pictures of this meeting which are sent to Adam. He runs them through facial recognition and finds out the dude is named Sam Bishop, who has criminal trespassing, 3rd degree aggravated assault and attempted homicide on his rap sheet, all dating back several years.
McGarrett and Quinn further tail Bishop, who meets with four tough-looking guys, observing this meeting from some vantage point nearby, and surprisingly, no one sees them or hears McGarrett's phone when it rings.
The four guys are pursued to a forest somewhere. McGarrett and Quinn with her telephoto lens are watching from nearby. The four dig up a 45-gallon drum which is full of money. When McGarrett and Quinn return to his truck, one of the tires has been flattened. McGarrett thinks this was done by Bishop.
The dialog that follows is idiotic, beginning with Quinn: "So any ideas on how we can kill some time while we're waiting for the tow truck?" They discuss playing Tic-Tac-Toe and 20 Questions. Really! Under normal circumstances, if McGarrett wasn't wracked with his usual Hamlet-like indecision and the fact we don't really know much about Quinn yet, because of the smoldering tension between the two of them, they would probably tear off their clothes and "do it" like wild animals in the jungle, causing a massive uproar in the H50 fandom.
When McGarrett and Quinn get back to town, she is busted by a bunch of military cops, acting on a tip that led to "a substantial amount of currency associated with a money laundering operation" in her apartment. This is obviously baloney, and because McGarrett just made her a member of the H50 team, she is released quickly by the Governor thanks to the usual immunity and means. McGarrett goes to Cullen's place and is pissed, because he figures Cullen was behind this frameup. Cullen replies by saying, "You have no idea what's going on here. But you're smart. I'm sure, at some point, you'll figure it out." Cullen walks into his house, which explodes.
There was a crime of the week, concerned with an airplane which crashed 36 years ago. The plane was only discovered recently, which seems very odd, though it took searchers 169 years to locate the ships from the Franklin Expedition in northern Canada which, unlike this plane, were buried under ice. Some deep sea diver is found dead in the wreckage of the plane which leads to an interminable amount of yap-yap among the members of the Five-O team at headquarters. Issues brought up in the show like conspiracy theories as to why the plane crashed could have probably been solved by Jerry in a matter of minutes. I am missing the big guy already!
The only major action sequence was at the end of the show, an underwater fight between Tani and a woman suspected of killing the diver. Like the big mystery propounded by Cullen before he got blowed up real good (or so it seems), there are a lot of questions left at the end of the show as to why the plane crashed, especially since its black box, which was recovered from underwater, was wiped of all data.
MORE TRIVIA:
- While the jury is out on whether there will be a potential romance between McGarrett and Quinn, it is interesting that Quinn takes a phone call, speaking Kurdish, to some woman in Iraq. (With a reference to the Kurds, the show becomes unintentionally topical at the moment.) The woman's husband was a police officer who Quinn helped train, and he was murdered within two weeks of his training being completed. Quinn tells McGarrett "I keep in touch with his widow." This is reminiscent of the "humanitarian mission" in Afghanistan where McGarrett's girl friend Catherine was involved in repaying debts to some local people who helped her when she was wounded during her service there. Catherine spoke Pashto during a phone call in the earlier episode.
- On the plane in 1983 before it crashes, some woman is reading Hollywood Wives by Jackie Collins, sister of Joan, who appeared on the show last season. Hungry Like the Wolf by Duran Duran is heard on the soundtrack around this time. The CGI for the plane crash is mediocre.
- Quinn tells Cullen that McGarrett's dog Eddie "used to hunt IEDs for the Marines." According to one H50 wiki, Eddie was a "police patrol dog ... which typically includes protection and apprehension work along with some scent work (potentially narcotics/bombs/tracking)." But according to a line in S08E02, where Eddie made his first appearance (and my own review of the show, duh!), "Eddie's been with us [the DEA] for three years. Before that, he was a war dog stationed in Afghanistan." Thanks to Belle for the correction.
- A big deal is made of the fact that you cannot fire a revolver under water (a .357 Magnum specifically). So how does the suspect Tani is chasing (and we think is wounded by Tani) fire from under and up through the dock which is very close to the water line? Is she just hiding under the dock?
- Tani is super annoying in a jerky way when a conspiracy theorist named Pollack (Stephen Full) is being grilled in the blue-lit room. This interrogation is very heavy-handed, though the guy is kind of a creep. His name in the CBS press release is "Pollack," but in the subtitles it is "Pollock."
- The IP address of Delphi Son, the "godfather of Flight 912 [the crashed plane] conspiracy theories," is 258.100.124.005. The largest number you can have in a 4-part IP address is 255.
- When McGarrett and Quinn start to have their "what shall we do to kill time" conversation, the music almost starts to veer into the usual "cute" music heard during similar conversations between McGarrett and Danno.
- In the tenth season opener, Quinn tells Adam at the Yakuza meeting place: "You guys have been all up in my business today." In this show, she tells Cullen "So we [herself, McGarrett and the rest of the Five-O team] are gonna be all up in your business 24/7." Later in this episode, when McGarrett is with her, he asks her, "Is it just me, or are you always this up in everyone's business?"
- Tani running down the dock at the end of the show wearing these high-heeled shoes was pretty ridiculous.
- Quinn has a good line when she describes beef jerky as "meat trying to do a plywood impression."
This episode, directed by Peter Weller, had lots of ass-kicking action as well as one huge plot twist.
Unfortunately, we also had to listen to a lot of drivel at the beginning as the returned Dannoying was nagging McGarrett to get a girlfriend, using Eddie as an attractant. (Strangely, most of the posts on Google about girlfriends and dogs seem to be of the nature "Should I keep my girlfriend or my dog," "Are dogs good for relationships," "Girl friend makes a guy choose between her and the dog," etc.)
Thanks to Danno's meddling, Eddie ends up getting in a scrap with some woman's English mastiff and injured, requiring stitches. This necessitates a trip to the vet where the vet, Dr. Okino (Presilah Nuñez), is mega-hot. Danno cannot shut up about McGarrett's romantic issues even while in the vet's office, but fortunately, the "serious business" phone call is received, and McGarrett assigns Danno to deal with it.
McGarrett does ask Okino for a date near the end of the show, after Eddie, wearing an Elizabethan collar, starts conversing with him by whining and whimpering, sort of like the famous German shepherd in the YouTube video which has over 200 million views.
There was only one crime of the week, which had to do with what looked like a tenth grader from a Honolulu private school named Yumi Chun (Kirstin Leigh) being kidnapped. When the van of the three men who grabbed her on the street late at night is found, they are all dead, and evidence suggest that she killed them all.
After she is tracked down, Tani and Quinn go to see Chun, thinking that she murdered the trio because they raped her, but in a major twist, the girl puts both Tani and Quinn out of action with various martial arts moves and escapes. It turns out that she is actually an IT specialist from North Korea who is the subject of an Interpol Red Alert.
Because Jerry is no longer with the team and Adam's computer skills are not far-reaching, Grover and Adam go to Halawa where they get computer whiz Aaron Wright (Joey Lawrence), now incarcerated there, to help them. They have found out that Chun befriended another girl at the private school whose father, Major General Avea (Kevin E. West), is a big shot in the US military, and grabbed the password from the father's computer via a camera which she installed in a lamp above the keyboard on his desk when visiting her new friend's house.
At a coffee shop with wi-fi, Chun accesses Avea's account using this password and is going to upload tons of top-secret information to the Dark Web, something the wise-cracking Wright has to thwart. This is all designed to distract people from Chun's actual mission, which is to grab a North Korean defector now working with US intelligence named Jae-Sung (Robert M. Lee), who was "responsible for one of the most successful mass escapes from North Korea in modern history" and return him back home (though it is connected with her mission, as the next paragraph will reveal).
Chun grabs Jae-Sung from his apartment after taking out 6 guys from CID who were sent to deal with her in another spectacular display of martial arts ass-kicking. (Seriously, too bad this woman is a villain, and a now-deceased one. Five-Zero could use someone like her to replace the long-departed Kono.) If she doesn't get a plane to take the two of them back to their homeland, she will release the military secrets to the Dark Web in half an hour.
Fortunately, Wright is able to stop the transfer of data in a Goldfinger-like finish with only one second left. Grover, who is wearing a very cool shirt in this episode, motivates Wright by telling him, "If you can't stop this document dump, that means you're not as good a hacker as we thought you were, which makes you pretty much useless to us." He and Adam threaten to leave, adding, "That means we'll be the last human contact you ever have in your entire wasted life, and that coffee that the floor's drinking right now [which they had gotten for Wright], well, that'll be the last thing you ever taste that ain't lukewarm and suspiciously lumpy." Wright tells Grover, "You paint a vivid picture."
The show was not without some things which caused me to scratch my head:
The whole business of downloading or uploading data by Chun in the coffee shop was confusing. She is "uploading" information while seemingly accessing Avea's account, which doesn't make sense. It actually says on her screen: USER LOG-IN > MAJOR GENERAL AVEA: Classified Access Granted and 100% UPLOAD COMPLETE when the upload is complete.
Typically she would have to download the information from Avea's account on to another device (like a laptop, a very large flash drive or the cloud), then prepare it to upload to the Dark Web with a timer of some kind, as per her threat. Wright says she accessed ten terabytes of data, which is a massive amount. Assuming Chun was transferring this amount of data in the coffee shop in some way (which I doubt), this would take a lot longer than the time spent by the guy whose computer she was "borrowing" who was getting them a couple of lattes. It would have made more sense to just show her activating the timer for data which she had already prepared.
From what we can see, in Halawa Wright is just accessing the names of the files, not the files themselves. But McGarrett requests that Wright do a keyword search for "North Korea" and "Oahu." Is this in the file names or the actual files? If it was for the actual files, and he had to slog through ten terabytes of material, this would require an extremely fast Internet connection and an extremely fast computer. (Even the file names for ten terabytes of material might take quite a while to view and/or search through.) Do they have wi-fi of that capability in the prison? Even if there was fiber-optic available there with fast speeds of 1 or 2 gigabytes per second, accessing it via wi-fi on a laptop would produce much slower speeds.
However, despite this dumb stuff and the Dannoying nonsense -- and even the beers on the beach finale where Quinn talked about her first real day on the job -- I enjoyed this show, which was a huge improvement over the first three of this season!
MORE TRIVIA:
- The bad guys who kidnap Chun are all candidates for "the wackiest names that don't exist for anyone in the real world so we won't get sued": Silas Gajaista, Richard McFebland and Otto Vellonello. Actually "Vellonello" was mentioned in S09E14, the name of a shopping center in Colorado being attacked by terrorists, another episode directed by Peter Weller.
- In S10E01, Quinn tells Cullen near the end of the show: "You borrowed money from Michael Lee, not knowing that he was just the front man for Isko Zhang." In S10E04, supposedly the same quote, Quinn tells Cullen in the "previously on": "You borrowed money from Michael Lee, not knowing that he was just the front man for the yaKUza." She pronounces "yakuza" wrong, with the emphasis on the second syllable.
- When Danno natters on about McGarrett's social life at the dog park, he is told "Shouldn't you be focusing on your own dating life? Like your ex-wife?" Later, Danno relates a story to McGarrett about how he tried to impress a girl in high school which is really pitiful. Later still, during a brainstorming session around the Supercomputer, Danno interrupts Tani, telling her that she has "no lead at all" based on information obtained from the kidnappers' van, but she is not finished, and tells him, "Patience, darling. Allow me to get there."
- In addition to Mandarin, Quinn can speak and understand Korean which she "uses to translate the hostage taking of some of America's most dangerous secrets," not to mention a discussion between Chun and Jae-Sung where it turns out the relationship between the two is "personal."
- If you search Google News for Presilah Nuñez who plays the vet, you will find some interesting pictures of her. For some reason, Nuñez wasn't included in the CBS press release for the show at all, even though she is in the credits at the beginning of the episode. Kirstin Leigh, who played Yumi Chun, has only a couple of very insignificant entries at IMDb prior to the show. She does have a considerable following on Instagram and YouTube, though.
- The computer that Wright is using has a sticker for Oahu State University on it.
I couldn't get excited about this episode at all; it took me five days to review it.
Similar to previous Hallowe'en shows, there were a lot of Hawaii Five-Ohana aspects to this one, like the party at the beginning. There were some laughs at how lame Noelani's Elton John costume and accent were, and how the old lady, ostensibly Flippa's mother, was fussing over everyone. (Flippa was dressed as a very fat Elvis.) Tani was a bone-racky mermaid, who made you wonder how she and the long-departed and equally bone-racky Kono could be the ass-kicking queens of the Five-Zero team. Tani's makeup was hideous. There were also laughs from McGarrett's dog Eddie, who, greeting trick-or-treaters at McGarrett's place, was unco-operatively dressed up as a lion (also pretty lame).
There was some minor cattiness between Tani and Quinn (dressed as Maverick from Top Gun) when the latter wondered where Junior was, to which Tani said "How would I know that?" Quinn replied, "I'm ... I'm sorry. I just ... I assumed ... I mean, I assumed that you ... What are you guys?" Tani said, "Ah, at this point, I want to say I ... I don't know." Whatever!
Max (Masi Oka), the previous medical examiner who left the show in S07E13, over two years ago, was present, again in Keanu Reeves getup, though I couldn't figure out if Max had returned just for the party. Considering he is working for Doctors Without Borders in Madagascar, who have a default salary starting around $25,000-$30,000 a year (depending on experience, it's almost a "voluntary" position) and it would cost over $5,000 to fly him and his kid to Honolulu (a hideous 38-hour flight via Johannesburg and New York), I wonder if Max is independently wealthy (was this ever established?)?
Max has brought along his son Tunde (Jonny Berryman), who is adopted, just like Max himself was. There is no mention of Max's wife Sabrina, played in earlier episodes by Bruce Willis's daughter Rumer. During the show, Max cannot resist being annoying, inserting himself into Five-Zero's investigation of two crimes of the week and dispensing his usual geeky information.
The first crime of the week involved Edith Lahela (Blossom Lam Hoffman), an old lady who is brutally gunned down in her front hallway while dispensing Hallowe'en goodies by Ralph Fosse, who was doing renovations at her house recently and noticed that in her basement there was this room with a thick steel door that looked like a safe. However, it isn't a safe but a bedroom for a man named Kimo (Derek Mears) who the old lady adopted as her son years before.
Edith was once a nun, and she was helping out Mother Superior Decosta (Lisa Kaminir) at their convent by taking a kid that the Mother Superior had had out of wedlock to a hospital, but then decided to keep him. Confined to Edith's house for many years and often locked up in this basement room to keep him out of trouble, this kid developed an elephant-man-like skin condition (how this happened was not explained).
The whole business of keeping someone under wraps like this for years is not impossible -- there are numerous cases throughout the world, usually involving young girls who are kidnapped and sexually abused, but recently in the news was the story of a family in Holland who spent nine years living in a small room in their house "waiting for the end of time," and never venturing out of the place.
When Fosse breaks open the "safe," he gets a big surprise, since there are no valuables, and he gets killed by Kimo. Kimo pursues Fosse's accomplice, who runs away in terror. Later, Tani and Quinn are delegated to track down Kimo when he is seen invading someone else's house on its security system, the owners being absent at a Hallowe'en party. Tani is again wearing the clumpy high-heeled shoes seen in the previous episode and when she goes up stairs in this place, she is walking at an angle. (I can relate to this, since I have size 13 shoes.)
The second crime has to do with the recovery in the trunk of a submerged car of the body of Lana Nakua, a young girl who had vanished a couple of months before after a frat party she was attending. Three well-heeled mainland boys were the major suspects in her disappearance, but Duke, who was investigating the case, was never able to prove anything. After Lana's gross-looking recovered body is stolen from the morgue, giving Noelani a few scares accompanied by clichéd horror music, Five-Zero tracks down two of the frat boys, both of whom are now dead, leading to the conclusion that the remaining guy, Zach Wyatt (Alex Kingi), orchestrated the plan to steal the body and then murder his two associates.
The ending of this crime was kind of stupid. Zach is about to bury Lana's body, but suddenly her sister Emily -- who was so freaked out by the theft of the body from the morgue that she wouldn't even get out of bed -- suddenly appears out of nowhere (Zach is already in the middle of nowhere) and puts Zach out of action. Dazed, he thinks that the sister is Lana, because of the family resemblance. So how did Emily know where to find Zach?
There was a hair found, presumably from Lana, on one of the two dead frat boys, and it is black. According to Junior, "it was a familial match ... DNA was female." But it is NOT from Lana. The Supercomputer pulls up a picture of Lana's mother, whose hair is blonde. But considering she is a middle-aged woman and Asian, it is very likely that her hair really is black and she has just dyed it, duh! McGarrett and Junior check out a picture of Emily, whose hair is black and McGarrett says "Hair's a match," duh again!
All by her self, Emily has put Zach in the trunk of his car along with her sister's body and she dumps it underwater somewhere just like happened with Lana two years before. Five-Zero all too easily pings Emily's cel phone, and Junior tracks the car, now submerging, and pulls Zach from the trunk just as he is on the verge of drowning. Nearby in a forest, McGarrett tracks down Emily who is trying to escape.
What follows after this is disappointing. The deformed Kimo is cornered by HPD cops including Duke, who have been after him all evening. When Kimo will not comply with the cops' demands, Duke starts talking about taking him out with "lethal force." What? I always had this idea that Duke was kind of a laid-back, compassionate type of person, but here he is acting like a typical cop who would shoot first and ask questions later -- "If he doesn't back off, we're going to have to take the shot." If a resolution like this happened in real life today, you can imagine the huge uproar there would be from people concerned about the rights of disadvantaged people like Kimo!
Fortunately, thanks to Tunde, who had just performed a kind deed towards Kimo by giving him a Hallowe'en candy, as well as Max, who shows up with kind words like "I lost my mother, too. And I felt angry and scared, and alone, just like how you're feeling right now. But you're not alone. You're not alone anymore," the situation with the cops is diffused.
Kimo's real mother, Mother Superior Decosta, is also there (don't ask me how Five-Zero accomplished this so quickly). She shows him her eyes, one blue, one brown -- which Kimo also has -- that they had bonded together over many years before during a brief visit at Edith's place, and a headline-making and demonstration-provoking incident is avoided.
This episode, consisting of two crimes, was bad ... like excruciatingly bad, dude.
At the beginning a car is being chased by HPD, having committed vehicular homicide when it ran through an intersection and killed a pedestrian. When the cops finally manage to stop it, there is no driver inside -- it is a "driverless car." Its plates are fake and the VIN has been filed off.
Meanwhile, two stoner videographers from Instagram (and maybe YouTube) named Scooter and Skeez (Tom Allen and John Parr respectively, a real-life comedy duo of sorts) arrive at the "Christian Bale Batcave," a.k.a. Five-Zero headquarters, to film a recruitment video for HPD with their cell phones. McGarrett, being kind of busy, assigns Tani and Quinn to work with them., describing the two women as "very knowledgeable, very professional, and very patient,"
The governor reportedly hired or at least approved of this dopey duo to make the video, a decision which is hard to understand. Surely this would have been put "out for tender" with respectable ads in newspapers and so forth. Maybe "appeal to young people" was a requisite of applying to make it? Or considering that Noelani immediately knew who Scooter and Skeez were, maybe their reputation preceded them with the governor? We don't know how old the governor is, after all. Or maybe the governor was smoking crack when she (assuming she still is a "she") hired them?
Why Dumb and Dumber are suddenly following Five-Zero around is curious, since the video is supposed to be about HPD. Maybe they already wore out their welcome with the latter? When Duke encounters them later at a crime scene, he says "We've already met," not looking too enthusiastic. More likely, it was because Five-Zero would have their finger on the pulse of major crimes that HPD deals with, so they can get access to stuff other than jaywalking tickets … and maybe the idea is, if you work hard at HPD you could be eventually appointed to work for Five-Zero. After all, look at some of the miscreants who make up (and have made up) the “team”!
The two filmmakers follow the two gals from Five-Zero around as they investigate the murder in an apartment building of an old biddy named Marion Polani who was harshly disliked by everyone living there -- "there's not a single person in this building that Marion hasn't managed to piss off." I hated every second the two social media stars were on the screen. The stereotypical stoner dialogue they were mouthing and situations they kept getting themselves into were moronic. I kept saying, “Who wrote this garbage?” and “How could actors act this garbage?" Seriously, it was worse than S06E11 (McGarrett and Danno go to a couples' retreat) and S07E16 (the 2017 Valentine's Day episode).
Meanwhile, at the HPD crime lab, one major obstacle to cracking the case with the driverless car is the fact that the transmitter for the car operates on an ultra-high-frequency radio link that can be operated from as far away as 150 miles. As well, there is a remote-controlled box in the car that opens up to accept money from dope fiends who show the cash to a camera and then, once the cash is secured, dispenses drugs to them from another box.
It seems to me that this idea, as Danno says -- of "some tech-savvy drug dealers [who] have found a way to mitigate the risk of their own guys ratting on them" -- is not going to make an major impression if it's pitched as a business proposal to Shark Tank or Dragon's Den. The bad guys supposedly have lots of cars — "a warehouse full of these puppies," according to Grover -- but cars are not cheap, and I suspect neither is the fancy equipment that is installed in them so they can drive driverless. Yet these entrepreneurs are using these cars for $400 drug transactions? This is really not a viable business plan, especially when one of your cars gets cornered by the cops and another flies off a cliff and blows up!
The crime lab, after working harder, determines that the driverless cars' operating system is some proprietary software owned by a company called Tropovision Technologies -- which, of course, just happens to be based in Hawaii. Julia Wahea (Sophie Oda),who runs R&D at this company, is "some kind of whiz kid, [who] basically invented this software herself."
Because an unauthorized download of the code did occur, Julia is hauled into the blue-lit room and grilled. She denies she had anything to do with the downloading, even though, as Grover points out, her "student loans are still sitting there unpaid." (Geez, these guys know everything, don't they?)
Grover has to eat his words, though, when he brings a laptop into the interrogation room shortly after this which shows someone else apparently downloading the code, and it just happens to be Julia's father Micah doing the deed at what looks like an Internet coffee shop! Now, her father has never been established as a geeky type. In fact, 12 years ago, she "tried to help him get clean but he was too far gone," meaning some serious substance abuse. More recently he showed up "clean and sober," but obviously still had some kind of connection to the "dark side," because "the drug dealers strong-armed him into it [getting the code]," after the father told them that his daughter had developed it. There is so much background data missing here it is unreal!
We get to see another camera with surveillance footage which is where the bad guys have taken Julia's father and he is being badly beaten up -- obviously in the garage or warehouse where all the drug delivery cars are located. Fiddling on the keyboard that has been provided to her at Five-Zero headquarters, Julia controls one of the cars in a manner like Knight Rider and the bad guys are all put out of action.
Meanwhile, back at the crime scene where they are hanging out, Scooter and Skeez have locked themselves out of the apartment building on the roof where they went because, as Quinn puts it, "their stoke levels were getting low and they came up there to get blazed," and then called for the two Five-Zero women to let them back in. Despite this, while they were waiting, the two "cracked the case wide open," that whoever killed Marion avoided the security cameras in her building by using a ladder to come to that building's roof from the one next door, which seems like a very hairy operation more suited to the Flying Wallendas.
The prime suspect in this, who suddenly appears in the blue-lit room at headquarters without any explanation (though S and S already guessed "dude could be guilty" earlier on, accompanied with an infantile diagram) is Brent Garis (Greg Cromer), the building manager.
Turns out that Garis was accused by Marion of embezzling money from the building, for billing the owner for repair work that was never performed. How Marion figured this out is a mystery; her e-mail, which Quinn and Tani had time to snoop in, revealed this, and gave Garis "motive." As well, Garis' bank account, which Five-Zero had instant access to in the usual manner, shows "several large deposits that coincide with work that [he -- Garis] billed [his] boss for but never completed."
There is some further "circumstantial" evidence related to this which gives material for discussion. Records from Garis's cell phone show it connected and disconnected between the building next door which Garis allegedly used as the base for the ladder and Marion's building when the phone was using the wi-fi in each building. Both of these buildings were managed by Garis's company.
Along with the financial information mentioned above, this suggests that Garis was the one who crossed over using the ladder (seemingly oblivious to anyone on the ground), murdered Marion and then went back to the second building. I would think that if you went from one building to the next one, and the buildings are not THAT far apart, the cell phone signal would stay locked on to the router in the first building you had been in. But there are several factors affecting this -- what kind of a phone Garis had, the strength of the signal from the routers, etc.
There are also questions about Marion hassling Garis through e-mail, based on plenty of pro and con articles on the Internet as to whether seniors are tech-savvy or not, but Marion sounds like someone who had little else to do with her time other than snoop in everyone else's business.
One positive thing about the show was the returning Dannoying was very restrained, almost philosophical in his car discussion with McGarrett, who he called a "catastrophist." McGarrett had a good response: "You're really making the most out of that 'word of the day' calendar, huh?" Danno got to drive his own car to the crime scene at the beginning of the show; however, Danno did not show up at the shoot-out at the driverless car garage near the end, only McGarrett, Junior and Adam.
The show is good for one star at least -- for the gruelling stunt work where several guys got hit by cars! The ending, showing the final version of the video where the two "dudes" are dressed as HPD cops and there are two "doppelgangers" for Tani and Quinn, and the one representing Tani (Divine Dennis) says "We couldn't have solved this case without you," was actually pretty funny.
MORE TRIVIA:
- The domain name that is heard at the end of the show where you can sign up with HPD — http://www.JoinHonoluluPD.org — is real.
- One of the people in Marion's building who is a suspect in her murder for a few seconds is a guy named Todd (Ryan Sypek), a bartender, who came home around the time Marion was killed. But it turns out that Todd has an alibi -- every Tuesday he tells his wife Emily (Liana Green Wright) he is working late, but instead he goes to a "neighbor's apartment" to play Dungeons & Dragons. The neighbor's name is "Reko," spelled this way in the subtitles, but it is more likely "Reiko," which is a Japanese woman's name. Todd says "[Emily] and Reko sort of had a falling out last month," but nothing is made of this.
This show, written, directed and produced by Alex O'Loughlin, as well as starring him, was emotionally gruelling, especially its last 15 minutes. (McGarrett's mother gets killed, just to get that out of the way.)
Unfortunately, there were lots of problems with the episode. Now you might think I should give it some slack because so much of it was praiseworthy, much like I gave shows from the original Five-O 25 years ago when I first did my reviews of its episodes, because making that show in the late 60s and 70s was a big deal and lots of problems and mistakes were bound to occur, because it was being made in Hawaii.
Re-viewing Classic Five-O episodes some 25 years later has produced quite a few disappointments by how many "problems" there are with those old shows, and many of my ratings have dropped, including several of my "favorite" episodes. However, we are in 2019, when many of these problems no longer exist, or should no longer exist, because Hawaii has been the location for many TV shows over the years, and you would expect that the problems have been ironed out.
Probably the biggest issue with this Five-Zero episode is that the time frame is totally screwy. Why? Because typically on Five-Zero, events are seen happening around the time they would happen in real life, i.e., holidays like Hallowe'en and Thanksgiving, and sometimes specific days are mentioned which means the show is happening right now or very close to right now.
After the main credits, this show starts "8 weeks ago." A CIA dude named Coen (Taylor Handley), whose name on his CIA ID merely says "Agent Coen," meets with McGarrett (as well as Danno and Grover) in Honolulu. He says one of their agents trying to get close to Carmen Lucia Perez (Onahoua Rodriguez), boss of a faction of the Sinaloa drug cartel, was killed by McGarrett's mother who was also on the case in Mexico. McGarrett is incredulous. The CIA and DEA want him to go and get his mother and bring her home so they can hear her side of the story directly. They also want him to kill or capture Perez.
Coen basically says this will be a Mission: Impossible type operation where management will disavow any knowledge of what McGarrett is doing. Coen also suggests that if McGarrett declines this proposition, "we can't promise this will end well for her [his mother]."
After discussion at Five-Zero headquarters regarding what McGarrett should do, the reaction to which ranges from Danno walking out of the room without even saying "good luck," to Grover telling McGarrett "Like it or not, man, that's your mother, and if you don't go down there and see for yourself, you're gonna regret it for the rest of your life," McGarrett goes to Colombia because this will supposedly make it easier to get into Mexico since Perez, with "a lot of Mexican officials in her pocket, gets advanced warnings of any flagged operators or law enforcement specialists entering [Mexico]." But this makes no sense! There are seven other countries in Central America where he could begin his journey. Of course, not many of them are friendly to Americans using their territory for this kind of adventure, but...
In Colombia, McGarrett is supposed to catch a boat near the port city of Turbo which will take him to Panama City (you have to go through the Panama Canal to do this). Then he will catch a plane which will take him to Mexico City, which is still about 1200 kilometers south of Culicán, the capital of Sinaloa. But Perez already knows things (which we don't find out until the end of the show) -- like the fact McGarrett was going through the Paramillo Forest in Colombia, probably on northbound Highway 62, which is where we first find him after he gets there. (Google Maps is not too specific, the highway seems somewhat west of this forest, a national park.)
From above, we are shown an SUV containing McGarrett, who is being driven to Turbo by his "point man," DEA Captain Mateo Dias (Benito Martinez, from "The Shield"). They are on a 2-lane highway, driving on the left side of the road, which is wrong, because in Colombia, you drive on the right. Dias says they are "close" to Turbo, but if they are near the forest, they still have about 60 to 80 kilometers to go.
Suddenly they are no longer on the paved highway, but some dirt road, which makes me think that, uh, OK, maybe they really are close to Turbo. But they run into some "policia," who are, according to a credit at the end of the show, members of the Colombia National Police (CNP). These guys are quite likely on the take from Perez as per the comment above.
Dias shows these heavily-armed cops (who he says he trusts "with my blood") his DEA identification, which to me is a really bad idea. The cops suddenly start talking among themselves, and one of them gets an itchy trigger finger, so McGarrett tells Dias to "DRIVE!" I figure if they could average 60 MPH for the next 27 seconds, they would be almost 2400 feet away from the cops, though you can still hear the cops yelling and shooting at the SUV, which flips over and explodes in a spectacular manner so violent that no one could survive it (Dias is killed).
Of course, McGarrett, who seems very beaten up by what has happened, does survive, pulling himself out of the SUV, and disappears into the nearby jungle with only the clothes on his back to begin his "little Eliza on the ice floes" journey to Turbo, Panama City, Mexico City and Sinaloa. Think about it, this tall, badly bloodied, non-Latin-American-looking guy who would stick out like a sore thumb can make it all the way to the pre-arranged boat, because there are no roads connecting Panama City to Colombia through the Darien Gap (it is about 200 miles from Turbo to Panama City as the crow flies) and then to the plane with no one asking any serious questions.
Meanwhile, back in Hawaii, the "8 weeks" from the beginning of the show have passed, and it is "8 weeks later" (i.e., now). Junior is getting antsy, because he was ordered by McGarrett that if he "can't hold the line, Junior comes downrange -- to watch my six [my back]," only in the case of an "absolute, worst-case scenario" and only if McGarrett reaches out first.
For the last "few weeks," Junior has been running some computer algorithm in conjunction with satellite view that considers the average male height in Mexico is five foot to five-foot-seven and it "uses time stamp to determine sun angle and then people's height by their shadows." (I'm sure someone will tell me that you can really do this.) There are somewhere between 800,000 and 900,000 people living in Culiacán.
Following up on leads on anyone who was six-foot-plus like McGarrett, Junior cross-referenced those with local traffic and CCTV footage and hit a bunch of dead ends until he found him. So soon after this, Junior heads there with a couple of SEALs, Mike (Stephen Paul Kaplan) and Ethan (James Beck), the same two guys who helped with the operation involving Joe White in S08E24, which probably would take a few days more to organize. (Both these actors are retired SEALs.)
The teaser for the show took place on the Mexican Day of the Dead (November 2nd this year) and its scenes are rehashed as the bearded McGarrett, wearing a baseball cap, is seen wandering around Culiacán, still looking totally out of place, especially when he walks with his head down past a group of armed military types. Considering he was in Honolulu a couple of weeks ago during the Hallowe'en show, this date makes no sense. He goes to the CIA "safe house" (I think) where he has been staying ("living in a hole for the last couple of months") and is set upon by Junior and the SEALs. During the teaser, we see the gun of one of the SEALs fired during this scene, which is never explained.
McGarrett has managed to track down his mother. She is hanging out with Perez, who has "always preferred the company of women, biblically speaking," according to Grover earlier. Using a massive pair of binoculars, McGarrett already saw his mother give Perez her gun to shoot some guy dead on the docks. Pretending to be a janitor, complete with ID, McGarrett encounters his mother in the Sinaloa Port Authority Building, and tells her that she is going away with him. She smacks him in the face with her gun and tells him to quit interfering with what she is doing.
McGarrett talks to Junior and the SEALs, saying "Something's very wrong here" and that his mother is "unstable." He continues, "What we're about to do is completely insane on every level. Our chances of success are extremely low. We're going up against a much larger army of complete animals, who, and I promise you, if they get their hands on us and this thing goes south, will make us wish that they'd put a bullet in our heads." Their course of action includes explosives like ammonium nitrate which is in a cupboard in the place where McGarrett has been staying and a cache of guns and other armaments elsewhere. (All this is hard to fathom considering the kind of control Perez reportedly has in the area, so much so you would suspect that if someone farted too loudly, she would know about it. An earlier picture of some building connected with her shows 20 guys armed with machine guns standing outside it.)
McGarrett and his A-Team of three are soon watching the docks where a Panamax container vessel -- one which will go through the Panama Canal easily -- and a mini sub intended as a drug shuttle are seen. McGarrett's mother is on the docks with Perez. There are also a lot of heavily-armed guys in Perez's employ. A firefight to end all firefights commences, with shit blowing up real good left, right and center. The special effects people should get high marks for this, considering the extent of the chaos that is caused.
As the gunfire dies down, McGarrett encounters his mother in one of the warehouses on the dock and she points a gun in his direction, followed by some very intense conversation. But Perez sneaks up behind his mom, grabs her and then stabs her to death. Of course, what follows is very sad, which continues as McGarrett accompanies the body of his mother (and that of Perez, who is killed by Junior) back to Washington, D.C.
Coen is there, and he tells McGarrett, "Shelburne [McGarrett's mother's code name, which we have not heard for quite a while] outfitted that sub and Lucia's Bentley with audio and tracking devices. She stayed on target till the end. She did her job. I'm sorry about your mother, Commander."
The show ends with Danno showing up at McGarrett's hotel room, and the conversation -- at least as far as McGarrett is concerned -- is philosophical: "From the minute that woman walked out of my life, the only thing I've ever wanted is to have her back in it. So, am I okay? I don't know if I'm okay, but I do know that none of this is on our terms. We never really get to choose how it's [life] gonna look. Only what we do with the information when we get it. This whole Five-O thing started with me burying my father. Then Joe White last year. Now my mother. So I don't know how I feel, but I do know that we don't get life on our terms, Danny. It's life on life's terms or not at all."
Danno, whose presence at the end is totally unnecessary except as a sop to McDanno fans to convince them that things are coming back to normal, says that he is bagged from his trip to Hawaii and wants to share the large bed in the hotel room. McGarrett tells him to sleep on the couch. Symbolism alert, right up there with "Day of the Dead" earlier! McGarrett and Danno will not share the same bed ... and remember that it was O'Loughlin who wrote this!
Director and actor O'Loughlin -- who seems to be following in the footsteps of Jack Lord, who produced, directed and acted in several Classic Five-O episodes -- did an outstanding job, especially the last 15 minutes of the show. From the angle of "don't think about it too hard," especially the finale, this show overall should get four stars.
Hopefully the very positive reception for this episode will encourage the powers-that-be to give O'Loughlin more chances to engage with other large-scale projects like this. It was far ahead of the show directed by Daniel Dae Kim, S05E17, which had a really terrible script.
I would be really curious to see how O'Loughlin's original story for the episode compares with the final product. Not too be too cynical about his writing credit, but I am reminded by something the late Larry Cohen said regarding productions like this one where there are a large number of producers, co-producers, co-executive producers and executive producers: "[T]hey're really writers. And what they do is they keep turning the script over from one to the other to the other to the other, till nobody really wrote it and everybody really wrote it." You can see what I am talking about by the cover of this script from an earlier episode as to how many revisions a script might go through. This photo is credited to hawaii_isla_808 on Twitter.
This was a formulaic episode with the usual two parts, one the crime of the week, the other some "ohana" stuff relating to Grover.
You would think that after last week's horrible happenings, McGarrett would be allowed to take an episode (or even more) off, but after grieving for 1:12 in the teaser, including scenes featuring his late mother from the previous show, he was ready to get back into the swing of things, saying "I need to get back to work," though the members of the team expressed concern about him doing this throughout the episode.
At the beginning of the show, a medevac helicopter is bringing some guy to Honolulu after he was found in very bad condition, suffering from "extreme exposure," in the Mokulei‘a Forest Reserve. The guy flatlines, but after an injection, he comes back to life and throws two paramedics out of the helicopter, forces the pilot to land, and then kills him as well. McGarrett arrives on the scene where the helicopter ended up, saying "I guarantee there's a reason" for all that happened, i.e., there is something fishy about this guy connected with why he didn't want to go to the hospital.
Back at headquarters, the team is stumped as to who this "five-eight, slight build, Asian, early 40s" character is. Junior and Adam are delegated to go the area where he was picked up by the helicopter and try and "find out what the hell these guys [including the hikers who found him] are doing in the middle of the jungle."
Meanwhile, bleeding badly, the fugitive goes to some convenience store where he murders the clerk. When Tani and Quinn arrive there, they use security camera footage to see that he stole a burner phone. They use the number from this to locate an address not far away which the perp called. Inside the house, they and McGarrett find a DEA agent, Richie Gormican (Jesse Johnson). He talks to them in a smart-alecky way reminiscent of Don Johnson, no great surprise, because the actor is the Miami Vice actor's son and the resemblance between the two is uncanny.
Gormican identifies the "psycho" as Ben Tam (Garret T. Sato). He says it is unlikely that Tam wants to leave the island, because "if he did, he'd be leaving a $100 million dollars' worth of heroin somewhere out there in the jungle." Gormican says "one of his men" was flying a Cessna containing the heroin and Tam to a private air strip on Oahu when it crashed in the forest. Gormican is at this house because he has overheard chatter on a phone number in Hong Kong which Five-Zero also saw that Tam had called on the burner phone.
Tani finds out the house is rented by Sam Bishop (Walker Haynes), who we have already met in episode three of this season, the bad guy who was a pal with Cullen (now deceased). McGarrett and Quinn had surveilled Bishop and some associates finding a barrelful of money in the jungle.
Quinn says that it looks like the "big conspiracy" that Cullen hinted at before he was blown up is coming to light and it involves a connection to the Asian heroin trade. Neither Bishop nor Tam are at the house, probably because they already got together, and they are heading back to the location in the forest where the plane crashed, therefore Junior and Adam (and Eddie) are in serious danger!
As they are on the way to the forest, Gormican tells McGarrett he knows what happened in Mexico the week before, suggesting that McGarrett's involvement in the Sinaloan drug trade could make things more difficult for people like himself. On the other hand, he does offer McGarrett sympathy for the death of his mother.
In the jungle, Eddie tracks down the crashed plane and Junior and Adam arrive there moments before Bishop and his tough-looking goons also show up. Despite the fact that McGarrett, Quinn, Tani and Gormican are "10 minutes out" and Junior and Adam are in the forest somewhere in the middle of nowhere, the two guys from Five-O attempt to flee, leaving really obvious tracks for Bishop and his thugs to follow. Despite Junior and Adam quickly running out of ammo, the rest of Five-O shows up within mere seconds, and there is a laughable firefight, with bad guys dropping like flies, including Bishop. Eddie gives one of the villains a good chomping on his arm. Tam is dead, and Bishop isn't in good shape. A medevac is requested and quickly arrives, as do a bunch of US Marshals to remove the heroin from the crashed plane.
Back at headquarters, things get complicated. The pilot of the crashed plane is identified as Carl Brauer, formerly Garmicon's DEA partner, an agent who was on suspension for the last six months pending an Internal Affairs investigation connected with his dealings to the New York Serbian Mafia. Earlier, McGarrett and Quinn eyed each other, saying they didn't trust Garmicon, and their suspicions are now confirmed. The Marshals' truck is tracked down, and both marshals are dead and the drugs are gone!
The ending of the show is stupid. Using the Supercomputer, Adam puts up a flag up for all known associates of the Serbian organization and gets a hit. "This crew just touched down in a chartered plane at a private airfield in Makiki, all using fake IDs." How convenient! Five-O rushes to this airfield, where everyone is captured in a fairly boring manner (i.e., without the usual big shoot-up). McGarrett tells Gormican "things are about to get much worse for you," as the DEA agent is taken away without a word.
The "ohana" part of the show was not particularly interesting to me, though well-written, directed, produced, etc. (Chi McBride co-wrote this show, which was directed by Carlos Bernard, Tony Almeida from "24.") If this part of the show had a title, it could have been the Hawaiian word for "favors."
Grover invited Siobhan (Nia Holloway), a.k.a. "Bonnie," the daughter of his friend Mike, with whom he has been "tight since the fifth grade" to Hawaii to try out for the University of Hawaii basketball team since she is the "number one high school player in the nation." (Grover later calls her his "niece," probably a non-related expression, similar to her calling him "uncle.")
In addition to owing Mike a favor, which is not elaborated on in the show, Grover is also owed something from Metta World Peace (playing himself), currently a professional basketball coach and a legendary player, who Grover has also brought to Hawaii to help prepare Siobhan for her "audition." Details about what Peace "owes" Grover are also sketchy; at the end of the show, Grover starts to explain, but his dialogue just fades out.
Siobhan puts on a very good show. Grover later tells his wife "she gave homeboy the business," which is pretty funny, since we see her best him in only one move. But there is a problem with Dana Paul (Marita De Lara), the University of Hawaii women's basketball coach, because back home, Siobhan got in a fight with some girl and got expelled from school. Her father also told Grover that she has fallen in with the female faction of The Apostles gang in Chicago and a gun was found in her room. If Siobhan is to become a member of the UH team, she will have to stay with the Grovers, who have recently downsized, to receive "necessary positive influence." Grover worries that this will cause problems, but his wife Renee assures him that " if Siobhan needs our help after everything that she's been through, we will figure it out."
Unfortunately, the kid has been overhearing their conversation and she runs away, but she is soon located, no doubt thanks to help from Five-Zero tracking her phone. Siobhan takes this opportunity to straighten Grover out. She is not in a gang. Romella, a girl at her school is in a gang and was threatening Tianna, a friend of hers, with the gun. Siobhan stole the gun from Romella's backpack and "beat her ass," which is why she got expelled. Following this, Siobhan took the gun down to the police station.
Siobhan says the school and her father "don't care" about what happens to her and her friends. Her father in particular only "sees ... a chance to live out his dreams through me because he never made it to the pros" (so there is a basketball angle with her father as well).
When Grover asks Siobhan what she really wants out of life, she says she wants to be a cop, inspired by how he took care of her after her mother died of a drug overdose: "I wanted to be a cop since I was five years old." This leads to beers on the beach, which is only a minute and a half long, where whether Siobhan might join the team eventually is vaguely alluded to, at least in the H50 fandom if not the characters on the show.
McGarrett is not completely back to normal, but Quinn assures him that everything that happened today with the heroin bust and so forth would be seen as a great day for his career. She has even heard that Bishop will be released from ICU soon and can shed light on the mysterious "conspiracy." Unfortunately, as the show ends, Bishop is knocked off in the hospital, so is this the end of the conspiracy theme or not?
MORE TRIVIA:
- While the burner phone Tam called was used to call Hong Kong, the number which appears on the phone company records that he called there is a Hawaiian number: 808-555-0114. Other numbers Tam called are 808-555-0183, 888-555-0135, 808-555-0115, the last of these on Maui. The phone serial number is 002934944.
- According to his rap sheet, which was likely seen in episode of three of this season, Sam Bishop's Social Security Number is 926-63-1325 and his address is 200 Fornander Drive, Honolulu 96825 (though I don't know if this is the rented house in this episode). He was charged with criminal trespass in April 1998, aggravated assault 3rd degree in June 2001 and attempted homicide in January 2004.
- Gormican's Social Security Number is 976-17-9812. His address is 27 Caruthers Ave., Washington DC 20009.
- The Johnny Cash song "Guess Things Happen That Way" is heard on the soundtrack when Tam is in the convenience store.
Another two-part episode. Alas, we are in the "holiday" trope ghetto: Hallowe'en, Thanksgiving and (probably) Christmas. Next real show, December 6, is where Adam's girl friend Tamiko gets kidnapped "right in front of him" (kidnapping = another tiresome trope)!
Crime of the week was the usual absurdly-plotted nonsense. A koa tree, worth a fortune, is stolen from the yard of a "philanthropist" named George Parks (David C. Farmer), though the word "philanthropist" is not used anywhere in the show itself. Parks was murdered while the tree was being taken.
The tree is cut down, and a very clean cut, too, which means that a chainsaw with a very long blade was probably used. Assuming this tree was even moderately sized, it would have been a big deal to take it out of the yard, which means that a large truck would have been used, but Five-Zero doesn't check this angle. They do find "boot prints," but seemingly don't bother to look for truck tire tread marks, etc.
Via a guy named Lolo Joe (Atticus Todd) who specializes in koa woodwork, legal and otherwise, the four dudes who stole the tree, which includes Parks' gardener, are soon tracked down, all of whom have also been killed. A piece of the tree which has a hole in it is missing and the Supercomputer under Adam's direction is able to show this, sort of like a jigsaw puzzle. If there was a hole in the tree, there must have been something in the hole, probably connected with "an earring lodged in the lower section of the trunk" which contained "DNA ... for a Jane Doe cold case from 15 years ago," duh!
Suspicion for what has transpired soon falls on Parks' grown son Preston (Dan Amboyer). Grilled in the blue-lit room because of inconsistencies found in his cel phone records as to when he heard from his father about something fishy going at the property and Preston arrived to find his father dead and called 911, Preston starts snivelling that years ago he met some backpacker named Lena Schmidt from Germany at a beach party. He took Lena to his home where they had "a little party" of their own which involved drugs and drinking. When Preston pushed Lena into the swimming pool, she hit her head, knocking her out, and to avoid "that kind of scandal," he "took care of the problem." Her body, connected to the cold case via the DNA, was cut up into pieces which were scattered around a forest. Seeing a picture of this, Danno describes what happened as "disgusting." According to Know-It-All Adam: "It turns out the head was the only part that was never recovered. So it's possible we just found what was inside [the hole in] that tree."
Noelani points out, based on Lena's skull which, according to Preston's confession, was thrown in the Ala Wai Canal (make a note: Preston knew this) and recovered mere moments ago, there were additional injuries than the one where she struck her head on the pool. Three depressed fractures on the other side of her skull were what killed her. Grover and Quinn, who conducted the interrogation with Preston, realize that if Preston was the one who killed her, he would have noticed that "Lena's skull" (which, of course, is just someone else's used as a prop by Quinn) was missing the three fractures. The two from Five-Zero go back to the Parks house where Grover, in a very tacky manner, starts accusing the other two grown kids -- Olivia (Ellen Hollman) and Darren (Kyle Leatherberry) -- of actually killing Lena, right while their father's wake is happening.
This is supposedly what happened, though the other two totally don't say anything implicating themselves and look like "nice, innocent people." Preston, who has been brought along, is dragged into the room, and says that 15 years ago they must have killed Lena and chopped her up, etc., because they sent him to bed with some pills after they came home from the movies on the night Lena died, and he was obviously shocked to hear details of what happened after this during his grilling ... or was he?
According to Adam, who has been studying relevant text messages, after Preston arrived at his father's house, he followed the tree thieves, texted his sister about this, she tipped off Darren who went and killed them, and then she and Darren took the head and threw it (and the piece of the tree?) in the canal. But you have to wonder -- why did they put the head in the hole in the tree in the first place 15 years ago? Talk about stupid! Have they never heard of "dental records"? (Quinn suggests because of dental records, "You'd want to keep the skull close." I don't think so...) A dismantled AR-15 stashed in the garden shed at Darren's house has also been recovered, and bullets from it match those in the bodies of the guys who stole the tree, duh again!
I am not making all this garbage up, seriously! Anyway, the three "kids" are busted; I'm sure they will hire high-priced lawyers.
Grover and Quinn said several stupid things during this last section, by the way:
GROVER: How 'bout we begin with the fact that all of you here were drinking and using illegal drugs. (It was only stated that Preston was doing this. The other two were "at the movies," and there is no suggestion that the other two started indulging when they got home. And so what if they were?)
QUINN: Plus, there was the potential manslaughter charge on deck for Preston -- if she didn't survive. (Why would he be charged with manslaughter if Lena accidentally hit her head on the pool? It's not like Preston threw her into the pool with intent to injure or kill her.)
GROVER: And if she did, well, that leaves this family wide open for a multimillion dollar civil suit from Lena's family back in Germany. (Why would there be a lawsuit if Lena's injury was because of an accident? This doesn't make sense, though that doesn't preclude the family from launching action like this.)
The other story in the episode involved TanJoon. Junior's parents' house was robbed, including some valuables which his father had stashed in a secret place. There is only one person who knew where this was, other than family, which is Junior's "hanai [adopted] brother" Owen Ocampo (Damien Diaz), a kid who was taken in by Junior's parents years ago because of issues with Owen's mother, who was arrested. Without any build-up saying that either Owen or his mother were drug addicts (the only clue is the mother got "sober"), Tani suddenly blurts out "addiction is genetic"!
Well, it turns out that Owen is a doper, and TanJoon track him down to Ala Moana Beach Park where Junior gives the apologetic Owen a good talking to and convinces him to either go to jail or go to rehab. He chooses the latter.
The box of stuff that was stolen is recovered, Junior returns it to his father, and the sort-of-estranged two have a tearful reconciliation, because, despite the fact that the father has been acting all along like he didn't care about Junior's tour of duty in Afghanistan, he was keeping tabs on his son through letters from Junior's commanding officer which were in the contents of the stolen box.
Very nice acting by Beulah Koale and Meaghan Rath in this section, though it falls under the trope of "little to do with Five-Zero." At the end, now that the issues between Junior and his father have been resolved, we are left wondering if this means that the potential romance between these two will develop.
Incidentally, when TanJoon are searching for Owen, they go to visit his mother Eileen (Marisol Ramirez). When I first saw this character, I went "WHOA!" because the actress is totally gorgeous. However, someone in the casting department screwed up, because, aside from seeming to be about 10 years younger than the character should be, you would expect the character to be kind of skanky looking because she has been an addict for many years. They try to make her look a bit skanky in a couple of shots, but there is no way this will work. Personally, I hope they send the character to rehab and give her a respectable job as the Five-Zero receptionist, sort of like Jenny in Classic Five-O.
MORE TRIVIA:
- The music at the beginning of the show is "Slow Down" by Larry Williams. Near the end, it is "Made It Home" by AHI.
- Among the DVDs seen at Junior's parents' house are Deadpool 2, Bull Durham, Lawless, The DaVinci Code, Saw, Spider-Man, Billy's Boot Camp and Last Action Hero.
- Owen's mother tells TanJoon "When you see my kolohe [violent] son, tell him he owes me $50."
- My favorite line from McGarrett to Danno: "You get all jittery and stupid when you drink too much coffee."
- Darren's Social Security Number is 974-16-9924; his drivers license is HW2213092. He lives at 55-1660 Umealu Road, Honolulu 96825. Preston's drivers license is HY8712220G; his SS number is 953-05-9999. His address is 1978 Hukui Drive, Honolulu 96815. Olivia's SS number is 912-12-8573; she lives at 772 Sundown Court, Waimanalo. Her drivers license is HE95341325.
- It is interesting to hear how quickly Lena's skull is located in the Ala Wai Canal. In Classic Five-O episode S04E09, "The Burning Ice," a gun is thrown into the canal, and after two days, the ace HPD diving team still cannot find it.
The press release for this show looked promising: "When Adam’s girlfriend, Tamiko (Brittany Ishibashi), is kidnapped right in front of him, he shuts out Five-0 and breaks all the rules in order to get her back. Also, Five-0 investigates three seemingly unconnected homicides."
I don't like watching Five-Zero while it is actually on because of the commercials, though my remote has a mute button. However, I thought this might be an exception to the rule, so I sat down at 8 p.m., and got all ready. The opening featured Adam and his girl friend naked in the shower, a flashback to S02E22 where Adam and Kono were also naked in the shower, both an attention-getter, though this sort of shows a lack of imagination on the writers' part. Katy Perry's Harleys in Hawaii plays in the background. Adam's towel drops to the floor as he starts smooching with Tamiko and and some masked guys come in and abduct her. Adam fights back, which is dangerous, because one of the guys has a very sharp knife. A prize to this episode's editor for not showing anything censorable during this scene. As Adam is about to plunge the knife into this guy's chest, I was thinking "the blood on that knife looks phony."
Main titles!
After this, Adam seems to wake up, and Tamiko's father is there with a couple of "associates." They are cleaning up the place. Adam is freaking out, but the father says there was a ransom call and "no cops" is the operative word, even though Adam says Five-Zero can provide resources to help. The father and the goons leave, the father suggesting that Adam should go home too (meaning this is Tamiko's place).
We then switch to Grover's where Junior and Tami have been dragooned to help him clean up stuff he doesn't want in preparation for his "downsizing." Grover's attitude regarding the pile of junk in his garage, with shades of Marie Kondo, is "everything must go." He starts to get antsy over his daughter Samantha's bike from when she was a little girl. This is already starting to annoy me. Tani gets the "serious business" phone call which leads to the crime of the week, involving a triple homicide with three victims or three suspects or something.
At this point, I am seriously disinterested. The first commercial break comes on, I hit the mute, but when I try to unmute and go back to the show, the remote does not work. The batteries are dead. I rush to the kitchen and find the last two AAA batteries in the house, pop open the remote and not only are the batteries dead, they are leaking all over the place. Because the commercial break is so long, I manage to replace the batteries with just enough time.
The crime of the week goes ON and ON and ON. I am yelling at the TV. (Yeah, I know, it mentioned this would be happening in the press release ... my bad for not noticing!) McGarrett talks to the very preoccupied Adam who isn't coming in to work. Adam says "I came down with a bug or something."
Adam goes to see an informer named Bodhi (Dionysio Basco), wanting to know information "about Filipino gang activity, particularly anyone who's got a beef with the yakuza," because during the abduction, guys were talking Tagalog (like me, you may have missed this during all the other action). Adam keeps peeling bills off a roll of cash. Bodhi says, "They call themselves the Pinoy Playas. They just showed up on the island a few months ago looking to get a piece of the fentanyl trade, which the yakuza has locked up." Bodhi says the yakuza are recently suspected of torching a warehouse run by the Filipinos, which is maybe the reason for Tamiko's kidnapping.
Armed, masked, and driving a 1972 Dodge Challenger, Adam goes to the Filipino gang's hideout where gambling is in progress. He grabs some guy and hauls him away -- but is this guy the boss of the gang or what? Adam also takes all the cash from the game, maybe to make people not connect this incident with the abduction. (This really is what he is doing, it is confirmed later.) Adam leaves, putting the guy in the trunk, and other gang members come outside and pepper the car with gunshot as he drives away. A closeup of the back of the car reveals no license plate, since Adam took it off.
Crime of the Week ... zzzzzzzzzz ...
Adam takes the guy from the gambling den to Masuda's, despite the fact that Masuda said not to get involved. He tells Masuda, "He's with the Filipinos who took Tamiko. He'll know where they're keeping her." But how does Adam know this? Maybe this Filipino dude was just dropping in to the card game and has nothing to do with Tamiko! Since this guy was in the trunk of Adam's car, it's not like Adam was grilling him on the way to Masuda's, duh! (He really does know about Tamiko, because later he spills the beans about her location.)
Anyway, Masuda is annoyed because he has already arranged for Tamiko's return that evening, and doesn't want anything to mess this up. He says that he is transferring power from himself to Kenji Higashi (Fernando Chien), his wakagashira, or second in command. The ransom is Masuda's life for Tamiko's. He describes this as "a father's sacrifice, one I'm ready to make."
More Crime of the Week ... never mind …
Meanwhile, at HPD headquarters, the plot with Adam thickens. Detective Belden (Kimberly Estrada), who is investigating the robbery at the card game, talks to Duke, saying the cops found a watch there which has been linked to Adam via his fingerprint on its back. She says "One of them said the gunman tangled with their muscle and that the watch came off his wrist during the fight." Adam's watch is very obvious as he enters the gambling den, but then it seems to have disappeared. Dumb, Adam!
Even though we see a shot of what looks like an industrial park, Adam drives Masuda out to the middle of nowhere to exchange him for his daughter. It looks like Filipino bad guys have both Masuda and Adam in their rifles' sights. Tamiko and her father are reunited for a moment. But Higashi and others under his command then appear out of nowhere and overpower some of the Filipinos and kill the rest (this is stupid). Unfortunately, during the firefight, Masuda was shot. They drive away, with Adam wanting to take Masuda to a real hospital with surgeons. Higashi wants to take him to "our guy." But Higashi is now the "boss." Masuda dies.
Resolution of Crime of the Week: some guy who has been jail a long time gets released, can go home to be with his young daughter (sniffle)...
There are well over eight minutes of the show left, which would typically be for "beers on the beach," but this time it is for "Junior and Tani getting rewarded at Hy's Restaurant for helping Grover." Like this whole sub-plot, a waste of time.
Adam takes Tamiko home. He has some harsh words for Higashi, accusing him of orchestrating the kidnapping so he could take power from Masuda, and maybe even killing Masuda at the drop point. Just to show what a tough guy he is, Higashi executes the Filipino guy who Adam delivered earlier. This guy's face looks like strawberry jam, and it is fortunate that this appears only minutes before 9 p.m. to avoid upsetting people who might consider 8:00 p.m.-9:00 p.m. "family viewing" time. Higashi tells Adam, "I will make sure the authorities find out about your role in everything that took place tonight. And your career with Five-O will be over."
Adam gets a call from McGarrett, saying to come to Five-Zero headquarters right now. Duke is there, with the paperwork from the investigation of the robbery at the card game. Adam is in deep shit, to be continued...
I was quite surprised, the "Adam time" on the show (38.25%) almost matched that of the Crime of the Week (40.85%), but it would have been a lot better if the business with Grover (17.42%) had been eliminated and a LOT better if the complicated COTW had been trimmed or also eliminated. It looks like this Adam story line will be an "arc" based on what I have read in some WWW gossip column, so maybe Ian Anthony Dale will get more screen time as this resolves.
Global TV in Canada totally fucked up the streaming of this episode (there is no other expression for this). I intended to watch on Saturday, the day after the original broadcast.
I thought something was missing when I started watching it, like maybe the first few minutes. But subsequent investigation revealed that the first 17¾ minutes of the show were missing, and only the remaining 23 were broadcast. From 23:01 to the end of the time slot for the stream, 40:44, was a BLANK SCREEN!
On Monday the 15th, Global removed this screwed up stream, replacing it with the following:
As of 8:00 a.m. on December 17, the problem was fixed, though a cached link on my Android phone in the Global TV app to the episode which produced the above message caused horrible errors on the phone of the nature "Gboard not working." This error kept popping up over and over until I finally was able to clear the cache under Settings/Apps/Gboard and also delete and reinstall the TV app.
After the above B.S. kept me busy for a few days, the show itself was relatively easy on my brain, and it wasn't that bad, certainly better than some others seen since September. There was an absence of minor characters, but unfortunately also an absence of Quinn, and a presence of Danno. Hopefully we are not going to be seeing alternating appearances from these two in subsequent episodes for the rest of the season.
The Adam saga continued from the previous show, with him summoned to Five-Zero headquarters to reclaim his watch which fell off during the robbery and abduction at the Filipino gambling den. When Adam doesn't want to discuss what happened, just giving McGarrett this humuhumunukunukuapua‘a-fish-in-the-face look and handing in his gun and badge before starting to leave, McGarrett screams at him. This was an eye-opener, considering for much of the rest of the episode, McGarrett seemed to be really bored.
I didn't understand what was the big deal about Adam taking things into his own hands, because, after all, McGarrett did virtually the same thing a few weeks before dealing with his mother in Mexico, and there have been other instances of Five-Zero using their "immunity and means" with impunity. I think the only reason McGarrett got excited was because what transpired in the gambling den became a matter for HPD and Duke got involved. But where was Duke when Adam went to Mexico to join the "ohana" helping out Chin Ho, who was trying to rescue his niece in season seven? Although Adam did virtually nothing there, he violated his parole leaving the country, duh!
Anyway, Adam spends some time hanging out with his girl friend Tamiko, who is very sad because her father was shot dead in the previous show, trying to exchange himself for her. In a breathy, serious voice, Adam talks to her in banalities about the loss of a parent and so forth. At the wake for the old man, held soon after because he supposedly died of "a stroke," his slimy former-number-two-now-number-one Kenji Hajime gives an expression of sympathy to Tamiko, which is all crocodile tears, especially since he may have been the one who knocked her father off. Then Hajime starts to get all heavy with Adam, reiterating his threats to expose Adam as being responsible for the death of the Filipino guy who had been abducted who Hajime himself had killed.
Tamiko, who has near-perfect teeth, perhaps from the same orthodontist as Tami, says that Hajime telling her he got "comfort" from killing the Filipino who supposedly killed her father at the exchange point made her want "nothing more than to be Yakuza" herself, a surprising statement considering she just told Adam that she "hated" her father's "way of life." Perhaps this puts a bug in Adam's ear, because shortly after this, we see Adam entering a meeting, which looks like it is of yakuza big shots, so perhaps he is going over to the "dark side."
The crime of the week involved the explosion of a helicopter. The pilot, Jordan Natua, a respectable operator of a tourist business for many years, had flown some gangsters to the north end of the island where a fancy house, kind of out of the way, was the storehouse for an arsenal of munitions connected with the late Wo Fat. These bad guys were just reconnoitering the place and they returned that evening to wipe out the elaborate security force there and grab all the weapons.
After his trip to this place, Natua freaked out, realizing he knew too much, and quickly installed an elaborate security system in his house, which you would expect these baddies to just deal with in an efficient manner like they just did at the out-of-the-way place with the guns and ammo. But no, they instead decide to use a rocket launcher which they got from there and blow up not only the pilot in his helicopter a few days later but several tourists as well.
One of these tourists, Ellison Jones, a hedge fund manager from New York City, is suspicious, because he had taken $50,000 cash out of the bank after he arrived in Hawaii. Danno and Tani go to his hotel room where a woman named Rox Gilmore (Chloe Brooks) identifies herself as Jones's "findomme" (pause while we look this up on Wikipedia), someone who practices the sexual fetish known as Financial Domination. To illustrate what this means, Gilmore takes a $20 bill from Danno and burns it in front of him. Danno is not pleased.
That red herring dealt with, we switch back to the bad guys who reclaimed Wo Fat's arsenal, who are under the leadership of a woman named Daiyu Mei (Eugenia Yuan). She escaped from a Chinese prison, where she was being held for weapons trafficking, was born 05/02/1977 and is 1.72m tall and weighs 56 kg. She also has an Interpol red alert out for her. She was seen early on in the show arriving in Honolulu wearing an elaborate mask like those used by Rollin Hand (Martin Landau) on the classic 1960s TV show Mission: Impossible. This mask made her look like an older lady. Mei was also seen making herself visible to Junior as he was filling up his 1985 Camaro at a Honolulu gas station. She was accompanied by some character with a creepy pony tail who is her "driver" (Brian Arthur Cox).
Mei wants to broker the weapons (including a BGM-71 TOW and a Stinger) to some mysteriously-accented foreign dudes. Five-Zero makes a connection between one of her Interpol aliases and a warehouse in Honolulu at 1408 Whitman Street, but when they arrive there along with a bevy of HPD cops and the SWAT team, the place is empty. The woman and her crew are "one step ahead of" Five-Zero in another warehouse and she guns her customers down using a M4, which "fires up to 950 rounds a minute," presumably to get the cash which these guys have brought with them. One of the wounded guys merely has a bullet to the lung and Ms. Mysterious Asian Dame offers to call him an ambulance if he will relay a message to McGarrett that Mrs. Wo Fat (!!!!) is responsible for all the carnage and she expects to see him soon.
MORE TRIVIA:
- Fred Helfing tracked down the Aloha Gas station where Junior has his encounter with Mei which is at 3327 Campbell Avenue. The prices for the three kinds of gas can be seen: $3.57, $3.72 and $3.92 per gallon. The price on the pump Junior is using is not consistent with these: 17.549 gallons for $61.47 ($3.503/gallon) and 19.836 gallons for $70.00 ($3.529/gallon).
- When Daiyu Mei peels off her mask and sets it on fire in her hotel room sink, wouldn't it set off the smoke detector?
- Three of the passengers on the downed helicopter are identified: Wendy Dunwad, DOB 06/09/1976, 85 Fletcher Circle, H H 96822, a Dental Hygienist - Park Dental Group; Ellison Jones, DOB 03/19/1972, 104 E. 36th Street, NY NY 10016, Hedge Fund Manager, Sternwig Equity Partners; Bryce Yellonello, 11/07/1985, 92-302 Lolonau Road, Kailua 96734, Web Designer, Independent Contractor. Some of these bogus names have been used on the show before, plus Takahamo (one of Mei's aliases).
- The helicopter pilot ordered some stuff from buysellgunsammo.com, a real domain which was registered January 1, 2019. The name servers for this domain are on cbsig.net. If you go to cbsig.net, it forwards to cbs.com. Natua ordered the security system stuff on December 5 and 6, 2019.
- When Five-Zero and the cops arrive at the warehouse where Mei is not present, they make a terrific amount of noise. If she and her gang were there, they would be totally tipped off!
- Danno is relatively restrained in the show, though he does ask McGarrett if Adam quit because "he lost faith in your leadership skills." Later, McGarrett gets back at him, after Danno says he has taken up the hobby of bonsai. McGarrett tells him, "I'm glad you have a hobby that doesn't involve annoying me." Danno has an LOL line when he and McGarrett are going to the north of the island in a helicopter where there is a no-fly zone because of a protected habitat for the "nene geese," the official bird of Hawaii. Danno says to Tani, "If you need me, I will be on a wild goose chase."
- The serial number of the rocket launcher used to down the helicopter is WR5478LM-158.
- Tani refers to Danno as a "baby boomer," and he is offended, as well he should be, since a baby boomer was born between 1946 and 1964. Although I don't think a real birth date has ever been established for Danno, Scott Caan was born in 1976. Danno tells Tani, "I should fire you just for saying that." I don't think so!
- McGarrett says Wo Fat has been "dead for years," but it is only four years. Wo died in the episode on 11/7/14, S05E07, the 100th show.
- The address in Florida associated with Mei's alias there is 2761 Vestal Drive, Coral Springs, 33065. Her company is called Samzaki LLC. The GPS info for the building on Whitman Street in Honolulu is 21.3202 / -157.8664.
The two reviews below of the Five-Zero/Magnum, P.I. crossover reflect the fact that I don't know anything about the new Magnum, and have no intention of watching all the shows just to get "back story" on that show's characters.
Five-Zero shows up at a hotel, acting on a tip that someone connected to Mrs. Wo Fat will be there, only to find their suspect -- Brandon Powell (uncredited actor) -- flees, and the guy he was meeting, Daniel Hong (also uncredited), is shot dead. Since this is a crossover, "private investigator" (his term) Thomas Magnum (Jay Hernandez) and Juliet Higgins (Perdita Weeks) show up to let Five-O know that they were also watching Hong, working for the guy's wife who suspected her husband of having an affair.
After some uncomfortable introductory moments, the two teams decide to work together and Magnum and Higgins are soon at Five-Zero headquarters minus the usual "visitor" badges and the geeky Higgins is particularly impressed by the Supercomputer.
While Tani and Higgins go to the morgue to comfort Hong's wife Erin (Melissa Tang), Magnum and McGarrett go to Hong's house to snoop around. McGarrett drives the Ferrari which annoys Magnum, producing a "Ferrarigument." As they arrive at Hong's, the car slows down, but there is a squealing noise from the tires as if they were stopping on a dime.
Although the case is new, Tani already knows that Hong was not having an affair and tells his wife what they have learned. Although Hong pretended to make trips to the U.S. mainland, he instead made 9 visits to China, where he was involved with "very dangerous people."
Magnum breaks into Hong's place using lock picking equipment. Under a fridge which is noisier than usual, he finds some paperwork with Chinese writing on it, which McGarrett can understand. Back at headquarters, the others review hotel security footage in a time-consuming search. Higgins starts bugging Tani about whether or not she is involved an office romance (with Junior), and reveals that she herself had hot pants for someone in her previous job as a member of Britain's MI6.
As McGarrett and Magnum leave Hong's, an Asian guy, later revealed to be named Justin Lee (Jason Lee Hoy, credited as "Baldy") and connected to Mrs. Wo, shows up and steals the Chinese documentation from them at gunpoint. He also flattens two of the tires of the Ferrari, which are worth $800 each. To get back to town, Magnum calls on his two pals Rick (Zachary Kingston) and T.C. (Stephen Hill), who show up in the van connected with T.C.'s helicopter tour business. McGarrett and his SEAL exploits are well-known to all of the Magnum team because they are also military men. He is regarded as a "legit legend": "We are in the presence of greatness."
Thinking there is something fishy about Hong, Higgins makes inquiries of someone who owes her favors. She and Tani go to a parking lot near the Makapuu Point Lighthouse, where this guy, whose name is Zhou (Jo Sung), pulls up beside them and gives Higgins information which reveal that Hong was a high-level asset who infiltrated private military contractors as well as US intelligence and defense sectors with the intention of funnelling information and trade secrets back to Beijing.
Justin Lee is tracked down and when Grover and Quinn go to his place in Manoa, Lee ends up shot. Grover gives him a speech which is very similar to that from Mrs. Wo in a previous show, along the lines of "you are going to die from your injuries, so now is a good time to co-operate and we will call an ambulance." From Lee, they find out that Hong got his hands on a NOC list (a list of people who have no official cover). Rather than just turn it over to the government in China, he arranged to sell it to Mrs. Wo (who would probably do the same thing). This information was on an encrypted SD card, which would cost Mrs. Wo $50 million. This is what Hong turned over to Powell at their hotel meeting.
When Powell is tracked down to a house in Waimanolo via a rental agreement, people from Five-O and the HPD SWAT team show up at the place ready for action. However, they are overriden by a troupe of people from the CIA under the direction of Hollis (Chad X Lerman). These CIA people really are a "troupe," a motley group of amateurs who look like they were dragooned from people on the street and asked to be actors for a couple of hours -- really a bunch of red shirts! Several of these people go into the house which explodes in a huge fireball. Grover is happy that it was not his team that went into the house first.
Although 9 or 10 CIA agents seemed to go into the house, only 6 of their bodies are found. There is a seventh body found, a guard from Halawa named Bruce Iona, which is very fishy. However, McGarrett has a brainstorm because Powell, who was not found, has the SD card, which is encrypted, and the only person who can possibly break the code is Aaron Wright, who is held in Halawa. The team goes to Halawa where they encounter Powell, pretending to be Iona. Powell is shot dead after Magnum recognizes him from the surveillance they were doing at the beginning of the show. It is sneaky the way that they don't show Wright, except in flashback footage, just like McGarrett, Grover, etc. are "put under guard" by the CIA and also not seen in the upcoming Magnum show.
The SD card, which is still encrypted, is recovered. Back at headquarters, McGarrett thanks Magnum for his assistance with the case. Higgins and Tani exchange banalities about how you should pursue someone at work, even if it is a hassle.
The show ends with Tani phoning Junior to make a date ... but just after this, JUNIOR IS KIDNAPPED!
Things continue on Magnum, P.I. (see below)...
MORE TRIVIA:
- Global TV in Canada, who screwed up the last episode (see review above), also messed up this one. Shows from Friday are supposed to be available streaming on Global TV WWW site on Saturday morning, but this episode was not available until Monday, January 6th.
- This episode began with a "previously on" involving scenes with Adam. Later Tani phoned Adam to see how he was doing, but Adam basically blew her off, and we see that he has a ticket to Tokyo on United Airlines. (No credit for this company like in many episodes of Classic H50.) Both of these Adam sequences were kind of unnecessary...
- Quinn does a good job of enhancing poor quality surveillance footage, reminiscent of Classic H50's S07E16, "A Woman's Work Is With A Gun."
- Magnum carries a firearm permit which shows he uses a .45, Model 1911, Type STI, serial number 6587181920.
- Tani says in the episode "Cocoon," McGarrett "looked fierce in a Britney Spears' jumpsuit." Quinn says she is sorry she missed that.
- When Weeks talks about their surveillance of Hong, they expected to see him meeting a woman. She says, "[I]nstead of being visited by a woman, Hong greeted a gentleman. So there we are, thinking, "Okay, this woman doesn't know her husband as well as she thinks she does. But, alas, nothing more occurred."
- Brandon Powell, who lived at 1921 Kalanipaa Road made a lease with George Kalastana of 41-849 Laholio Street, Waimanolo 96795. The latter address was the place that blew up.
The crossover continued on the Magnum P.I. reboot in the hour following Five-Zero. The writing in this show, which was one big "race against time" to find the kidnapped Junior, was unbelievably mediocre, highly reminiscent of some H50 episodes in the past, full of crazy plot twists, red herrings, time-consuming trips across Oahu (yes, I realize it's just a TV show) and general stupidities. The show's script was credited to Peter Lenkov and Eric Guggenheim and it was directed by Maja Vrvilo, all Five-Zero stalwarts.
The CIA have rounded up McGarrett, Grover and Danno to grill them about the SD card containing the encrypted list of intelligence personnel known as NOCs (NonOfficial Cover); McGarrett was the last person seen with it. I don't know why they would have grabbed Danno, he wasn't even in the show earlier. Tani has managed to avoid the CIA people, and she arrives at H50 headquarters to find those guys snooping around the place. She leaves by an elevator, just missing some guy who is pursuing her, but she then jumps up and escapes through the door in the elevator ceiling, which doesn't make sense. Wouldn't she then still be in the building among all the elevator cables and so forth? How does she get out? A typical ceiling in an elevator is at least 7′ 4″ high if not more, and considering Tani is only 5′ 6″ (unless she is wearing her Olive Oyl shoes), there would be some serious athletics involved.
Anyway, Tani somehow escapes from the building and goes to pick up Quinn, who is the only other person who has not been corralled by CIA types, aside from Adam, who has left Five-Zero as well as town. It looks like Quinn lives in some kind of a dumpy place in the low-rent district like Chinatown (or is she just hiding there?). They go to Magnum's where Magnum and Higgins have been seen having a "Magnument" about how Magnum has "managed to hack adult life while also mangaging to shirk responsibility entirely."
Tani and Quinn explain that whoever kidnapped Junior wants the NOC list, and they only have four hours (not sure where they got this figure from) to find Junior, who is regarded as "collateral." Maybe they got this deadline from McGarrett, who managed to contact Tani by text, letting them know about his impending detention by the CIA. Both the CIA and evil Chinese guys want this NOC list now. The CIA want to make sure that the list isn't given to the Chinese, because it will compromise dozens of undercover operatives and result in sure death for them.
The resourceful Magnum figures that if they can get the list, they can warn all the people on it. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking away! Magnum and Higgins go to McGarrett's place, which the CIA have already tossed. Considering Magnum's hangout is in Waimanolo, based on a fragment of his P.I. license which we saw earlier, this is a 10 mile drive, which would take about 20 minutes. At McGarrett's they encounter Eddie, who is very annoyed seeing Higgins. (On the other hand, he loves Magnum.) There is something weird about Eddie's chin, is that hair or foam? There is also something else weird, because if the CIA guys were at McGarrett's place earlier, wouldn't they also have dealt with Mr. Cranky Eddie? Doesn't look like it.
Anyway, despite the place having been supposedly checked thoroughly by the CIA types, Higgins finds a laptop in a desk. Is the suggestion here that the CIA guys already went through this laptop? This would have probably taken some time; wouldn't they have taken it with them? Using this laptop, Higgins says "I can check his cloud to figure out where that text [from McGarrett to Tani] was sent from." REALLY? There just happens to be some default program on McGarrett's computer which can figure all this crap out?
This location is tracked down to near Helemano Farms, which sells Christmas trees in a "remote area" north of the middle of Oahu. Magnum and Higgins drive all the way from McGarrett's house to this area, where they find nothing. This is a 30 mile drive, estimated by Google Maps to take just over an hour. There are less than three hours left to the deadline at this point, I think actually a bit less. Higgins then pulls out another computer and she can see that McGarrett was meeting Kamekona at this location (IDd by KK's truck which just happens to have his logo on the hood) to give him the memory card for safekeeping. I dunno why she couldn't have figured this out back at McGarrett's house.
Magnum's pals T.C. and Rick, Rick being chummy with Kamekona, go to the big guy's shrimp shack in the Island Hoppers van driving pretty slowly, it seems, where they get the SD card after Tani, who is surreptitiously with Quinn in the van, as if the CIA, HPD or FBI who are all after the two of them couldn't see this, phones Kamekona and tells him "Give him [Rick] the card or I'm gonna burn down your truck." (She apologizes for this later; my apologies for the long sentence.)
Now they have the card, but even the computer whiz Higgins cannot decrypt it. Magnum suggests they have to get whoever encrypted the card to extract the information. In order to do that, they go to Hong's place to check out his computer. At Hong's, the CIA have already done a number similar to McGarrett's, leaving a laptop there. Higgins attacks the computer, unleashing a stereotypical clack-clack-clack on the keys by a geek who can solve problems immediately. But she finds nothing. Hong's wife Erin tells them that an "I.T. person" came to visit her husband three days ago, so they suspect that he had something to do with with the encrypted SD card.
Higgins then asks Erin for the wi-fi password connected with her house's router to further investigate. I was getting bug-eyed by some of the dumb things in the show, but this provoked a massive "WHAT?" from me. I assume that an "I.T. person" would not need to hook up to someone's wi-fi when he wanted to do something with his own computer, he would just use the computer of the person who he came to "help." This is utterly ridiculous. The guy is a geek dealing with encrypted information, why would he do something so stupid which could lead to him being traced?
Higgins finds this guy by the MAC (media access control) address of his computer, a unique identifier used to communicate with a network. although she says there is "no such thing as a MAC address registry." Higgins seems to be confusing some massive database which they could use to ID this number and trace it to a specific person with a place within the computer itself where the number is located by search through the computer's "registry."
As all this is going on, Tani is freaking out and hyperventilating over the kidnapped Junior, and Quinn and Rick are discussing Tani in a VERY loud whisper only a couple of feet away from her. Rick also takes this opportunity to try and get a date from Quinn, who tells him to forget about it. Bad!
The guy in the "registry" is named Eli Sung, who has a conviction in the HPD database for creating, using and distributing ransomware in 2011. As the clock ticks away more, Sung is rounded up (he lives at the bogus 23 Cane Street) and brought back to Robin Masters' estate's wine cellar blindfolded and with his mouth duct-taped where he is made to decrypt the card after Tani threatens to chop off his fingers and his dink using a cigar cutter which she found nearby (thanks to Fred).
No sooner has Sung decrypted the card than he erases all the data on it, saying "There's a digital footprint on the encryption that points straight back to me, and I'm not going to jail for treason." Right around this time, Magnum gets a phone call from a guy with a very scary voice saying there are only 50 minutes before junior is toast. There is speculation among those assembled that Magnum got this call because whoever wants this card knows they are involved with it. A process of elimination points to Hong's wife: "She just wanted to keep tabs on him. She was after that list and wanted to know who he was meeting with ... [S]he's a spy. And that she was trying to acquire the NOC list on behalf of the Chinese government." (The writers are really pulling things out of their ass at this point.)
Within yet another short time frame, Magnum and others meet a bunch of guys out in the middle of nowhere in a pineapple field to hand over the card, which they got Sung to re-encrypt, even though there is nothing on it, just to hopefully give them some time in the search for Junior. It's pretty funny the way Magnum says in a loud voice they are only dealing with Erin, yet she is in the black van that the bad guys are driving and would likely not hear him, but she still comes out of it anyway.
Junior is not in the place the bad guys said he would be, which Tani, Rick and T.C. have checked out while this confrontation has been happening, so Magnum reveals that there is nothing on the SD card either. The way Magnum deals with what follows is to approach the bad guys, grab one of them and then twist him around, using this guy's gun to shoot another. Talk about stupid.
Although we don't see what happens from this point on in the pineapple fields, I guess the bad guys are busted by someone, because the team, including Quinn and Higgins, who were with Magnum only a few seconds before, and Magnum himself plus the rest of the gang all go to some warehouse where bad guys guarding it are overpowered and Junior is freed, much to the relief of Tani.
The show ends with an almost 6-minute equivalent to a Five-O beers on the beach with Tani getting reaquainted with Junior and Rick trying again to hustle a date with Quinn. There were a lot of things in the first part of the crossover as well as this ending that, if they were eliminated, could have made the show fit into a single Five-Zero hour, I'm sure.
MORE TRIVIA:
- Envelopes at McGarrett's place reveal his address to be 2727 Piikoi Street, Honolulu 98621 (which is totally incorrect in real life). One of these envelopes is from Equity Investment in Westview Texas 76086. Just before Magnum is seen speeding to McGarrett's house, the soundtrack alludes to the Five-O theme, which is pretty funny, because this is almost never heard on Five-Zero itself, except in the opening and closing credits.
- Eli Sung's date of birth is 03/08/86, his driver's license number is HT9935782P, his Social Security Number is 987-03-2789.
- "White Sandy Beach" by Israel Kamakawiwo'ole is heard on the soundtrack at the end of the show.
Grover is about to start a golf game at the snooty Ali‘i Aina Golf Club course where his wife won him a round "fair and square by bidding on it at an auction" when he is interrupted by Zev Shaham (Alon Aboutboul), the club's head of security. There is something fishy going on in the club's cryo-chamber. Shaham knows Grover is a cop.
Now, let's just pause for a minute. What the hell is a "cryo-chamber," you ask? Well, I asked several of my friends and not one of them knew! According to Wikipedia under Cryotherapy, this is sort of the opposite of a steam cabinet. People dressed minimally are exposed to extremely cold dry air (below −100°C) for two to four minutes. These subzero temperatures are typically produced by liquid nitrogen or refrigerated cold air. This is a kind of "New Age" procedure which supposedly treats Alzheimer’s, fibromyalgia, migraines, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, stress, anxiety, and/or chronic pain, though there is no evidence that it actually works, according to the Wikipedia article.
Anyway, there is a guy named Chuck Tsao in this chamber. He is frozen like a rock because someone barred the door shut and he was stuck inside for 10 minutes at "minus 200 degrees," though I think, because this is an American TV show, they mean −200°F, which is about −128°C. In the light of other evidence like dents on the inside of the door and bruises all over the guy's hands, Grover says this looks like a case of murder.
Despite the risks involved with this procedure, there was no one around supervising things and there also is no video surveillance, because, as Shaham says, "we can't have cameras here, so there's no way to check [because people could be naked, I guess]." But this is stupid -- surely there are cameras in the hallway near this room! By the way, while this Tsao guy has a Chinese last name, he doesn't look Chinese, though maybe that is because he looks like a giant frozen Popsicle.
Though I am sure Grover wants to get back to his golf game, he investigates with the help of Tani at headquarters, though Tani is not too happy because her true love Junior has been called away for reserve duty. From a guy on the course named Raul Diaz, also known as Ed Ramirez (Rogelio T. Ramos), Grover finds out that Tsao was a "degenerate gambler" who was betting "piles of money" on golf and poker at the club. Tani looks into Tsao's businesses, which included "a used car lot, a seedy bar, multiple pawn shops, and a check cashing place ... all high-volume cash businesses, ideal for money laundering." Grover gets HPD under Duke to go to these places where they find more than piles of cash -- the total amount of money they come up with is over $120 million.
This money, however, is bogus, and Tsao is suspected of laundering it for a counterfeiting ring. Grover has a Jack Lord McGarrett-like brainstorm, realizing that Tsao "starts skimming ... you know, to cover the debt. After all, with all that cash, nobody's gonna be too upset about a little cash missing here or there, but once that hole starts getting bigger and bigger, well, he needs to play more and more often and for larger and larger amounts, until finally, old bad luck Chuck found himself in a hole there was no crawling out of."
The funny money is traced to North Korea and is probably being funnelled into the States via China. It just so happens that Michael Mayfield (Paul Lacovara), another member of the golf club, has an import/export business running out of Shanghai, and Tsao played with him multiple times recently. Shaham manages to figure out a lot of these connections with "forensic accounting" in a manner similar to the Five-Zero Supercomputer, except he is just using a desktop!
The end of the Grover part of the show, which was already pretty good because of Grover's wisecracking attitude as well as the excellent guest stint by Aboutboul, was pretty funny, with Grover chasing the fleeing Mayfield around the golf course in a golf cart as Quincy Jones' "Money Is" played in the background. (Golf carts can reportedly get up to 15 miles an hour, around the same speed as a person would run.) As Mayfield is busted, Grover tells him, "I'll wager a large sum of money that the indentations on your three iron are the same distance apart as the handles on the cryo-freezer back at the club ... the one you barred in order to flash-freeze Chuck."
Grover and Shaham finally end up at the public Hale‘iwa Community Golf Course, because Grover found out that his application to join the expensive club had been suppressed for years. Grover does say something kind of odd, though: "You know, us Americans, Zev, we're kind of funny." Is he assuming that Shaham is not an American?
The first of two secondary plots involved McGarrett and Danno. They show up at the Leeward Academy where some kid named Blake has been bullying Danno's son Charlie. Because the parents of Blake are no-shows to a conference with the principal (Victoria Platt), and Danno is annoyed about this, he uses typical Five-Zero GPS-related methods to track Luke, the father of Blake (Coby McLaughlin) as he is driving, and eventually Danno and McGarrett pull him over using their siren and lights as if the guy had committed a crime or something. Talk about bullying. As soon as Danno finds out that Blake was acting up because his parents are getting a divorce, he has a complete change of attitude, culminating with beers at McGarrett's place at the end of the show, joined by Luke as well as Blake and Charlie, who are now pals. This part of the show was mostly B.S.
The other plot found Adam in Japan, in the Shibuya district of Tokyo, described by one web page as "the center of [the] young generation ... the most energetic district in Tokyo." Adam meets some slinky dame named Ariko (Alicia Hannah) in an alley at what looks like the back of a club. He tells her that she has "the ear of important men ... ears and other things." Ariko can provide him with a connection to the kumicho (top man) of the Tokyo yakuza syndicate, but she tells him "the boss will never agree to sit down with someone who carries a law enforcement badge." Adam tells her, "I don't have that badge anymore ... I gave it up ... I'm through with that life," adding, "if you need another reason tell the kumicho to see me out of respect for my father." She says she will see what she can do. (An aside: my Japanese wife tells me that "Ariko" is a totally bogus name, it would mean "child of ants" (like insects).)
At the end of the show, Adam meets the capo di tutti i capi Ryo (Michael Hagiwara) who, like Ariko, speaks very good English and has kind of a husky voice, just like Adam, who says that he wants to be oyabun (the absolute leader of a yakuza clan). Ryo says this can be arranged, but only if Adam resumes his job with Five-Zero and spies on their activities for him! Adam says this will mean trouble with Kenji, the guy who knocked off Tamiko's father, but Ryo says that he will deal with Kenji ... but what about Tamiko herself?
Oh dear!! (The music at the end of the show is very scary.)
MORE TRIVIA:
- Tsao was hiding money in a box used for J. Darby 25 year single malt whiskey. This is a bogus brand of Scotch featured in various TV shows which has its own WWW page.
- When McGarrett and Danno are seen driving during the show, they pass some guy even though there is a solid line on the road at that point (around 14:52 of the streaming version I was watching). Tsk! Tsk! (I'm sure this has also happened before.)
- Speaking of streaming, Global TV in Canada continued their screw-ups with this episode, just like the previous two. It didn't appear for more than 3 days after the original broadcast on Friday night.
- Assuming the production people recreated "Japan" in Honolulu, they did a very good job, especially during the chase where Adam is pursued by a couple of yakuza goons.
Directed by Peter Weller, this episode was excellent, and featured all the characters -- even Danno -- acting like normal human beings.
McGarrett's dog Eddie was freaking out big time, running across a road between cars, which led to a diagnosis of Post Traumatic Stress from two doctors, one being the hot veterinarian Emma Okino (Presilah Nunez) we have seen before and whom McGarrett apologized to for not following up on his date with her, because "I have always had a problem balancing the job with my life, and historically, uh, my personal life always gets the short end of the stick, and I guess I just wanted to let you know that, um, it wasn't a 'you' issue."
Very nice acting from O'Loughlin and Eddie, though I expected to see Eddie pulling off a canine Hamlet with his front paws above his head and a full range of PTS(D) symptoms.
Tani and Quinn forewent (the past tense of "forego," really) their usual Five-Zero duties and investigated with the help of a Marine Colonel (Mark Rolston), determining that Eddie's condition related back to when his handler in Afghanistan was killed. There were these purple flowers where this happened, known as restharrow, and Eddie had flashed back when he encountered the same flowers in the garden of McGarrett's neighbor, a botany professor (Sara Amini). (This seemed a bit far-fetched, but...)
Danno met a new girl friend (Kate Siegel) in the Chart House bar where he was "in a mood" thanks to his ex-wife. The two of them got very intimate very quickly, but when Danno was driving her home, his car went off the road to avoid an accident and his friend (never identified in the show by her name, which was Leslie, other than in some subtitles) was very seriously injured. Both Scott Caan and Siegel gave outstanding performances. The ending of the show was VERY sad.
Adam returned just near the end of the show, showing up at McGarrett's. Aside from the ensuing acting duel between O'Loughlin and Dale as to "whose voice is quieter, huskier and more serious," whether Adam will be spying on Five-Zero as per the "arrangement" suggested by the yakuza boss in Tokyo is yet to be determined...
Is it any coincidence that this show, which seems to have been well-received, even by cranky ol' me, subscribed to the principle of KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) -- well, aside from the business with the flowers and whatever was stuck into Leslie's back during the accident? Hopefully there will be more along these lines, but don't count on it.
MORE TRIVIA:
- Notice that when Danno and Leslie seemingly "do it" in the women's washroom, this is not in the Chart House but in the (as far as I can determine) fictional "Uhiwai Lounge," probably designed to discourage fans from duplicating this experience (assuming they pay attention to the sign on the washroom door).
- The place where the accident occurs is some narrow out-of-the-way road, where I think it very unlikely a large truck is going to be driving. There is plenty of precedence for this kind of road in Classic H50, right from the first season's "The Ways of Love" (S01E07) on.
- Presilah Nunez, who plays the vet, was listed in the CBS Press Release for this show, unlike that for S10E04 where she first appeared (and is still missing to this day). She was listed in the credits for the previous show as Presilah Nuñez. However, in this show's release, she is listed as "Sr. Emma Okino," rather than "Dr. Emma Okino."
- The song heard at the beginning of the show -- "I'm gonna be fearless, fearless, I'm brave enough to feel this, feel this..." is Fearless by The Goo Goo Dolls.
- The incident which prompted Eddie's PTS dates back to July 9, 2013 in the Farah province of Afghanistan.
- McGarrett tells Adam "Welcome home, bro" (at least according to the subtitles), which should probably have been "bra."
This episode was very watchable and had a lot of suspensful moments, though nothing we haven't seen before. It was well directed by Ian Anthony Dale (Adam) and well co-written by Chi McBride (Grover), both of whom had most of the action.
There was a major blunder near the beginning of the show.
Danno is consoling a relative of his new girl friend who died in the previous episode, who was named Leslie. Danno refers to his girl friend as "Joanna." While the word "Leslie" was never said in S10E14, she was referred to four times in the subtitles as such. Danno addresses this relative as "Mrs. LaPietra," though there is no one in the CBS Press Release under that name. There is someone named "Marie," who is actress Annika Marks, who is the relative in question. I presume "Joanna/Leslie" is the sister of "Marie."
Now don't try and tell me that "Joanna" was using the name of "Leslie." How can you explain this? Breaking some kind of fourth wall, did she whisper to the writers of the episode "I am using this other name in the show because [fill in some ridiculous reason here]"? Anyway, this scene with Danno was brief, as was the stupid finale to the show, an argument over breakfast in McGarrett's kitchen which was thrown in as another sop to the "McDanno" fans.
The show began with a "previously on" which showed the fatal accident involving Danno and Leslie from the last show, Adam's quitting Five-Zero and Adam's meeting the yakuza big boss in Japan, who (I didn't notice this before) delivered the line "How badly do you want to fulfill your destiny?" in a manner like Emperor Palpatine of Star Wars.
After these things which really were "previously on," the show transitions to the present without something on screen like "TODAY" or "AFTER THE CRAP YOU HAVE JUST SEEN." Adam and this other guy are seen in the usual middle-of-nowhere location where they are going to bury bodies of yakuza dudes who were in a "dump site" before.
To jump sort of ahead, this other guy is Endo Tanaka (John Harlan Kim). He is the godson of the new Honolulu yakuza boss Kenji, whose relationship with Adam could be described as "strained." Why these three yakuza guys are dead is not mentioned. Neither is why Adam is involved with all this.
Tanaka is a plant at HPD where he is training to be a rookie cop. By hacking in to the computers at HPD, while he was training, I guess, he has discovered that HPD knows about the murders of these three guys (who look very decomposed) and are going to find their bodies soon in the "dump site" where they were originally buried. That's why Adam and Tanaka are moving them. Tanaka is giving Adam some mouth about what they are doing, suggesting that it was Adam who tipped HPD off to the original location of the bodies, but Adam tells him to keep his trap shut.
Cut to the Honolulu Police Academy soon after this, where Tani is giving "weapons training" to a class which includes the above-mentioned Tanaka, who is the boyfriend of none other than Grover's "niece" Siobhan (a.k.a. Bonnie) Dayton, whom we first met in S10E08 and is also there fulfilling her "destiny" to become a cop (a real WHOA!!! moment when we first see Tanaka). I thought it was weird that considering Tani was kicked out of HPD rookie training for punching her instructor Keo in the mouth (she is "doing a favor" for him by leading this class!), wouldn't she be persona non grata anywhere near the academy?
Anyway, Tani and Bonnie have a heart-to-heart after class where Bonnie says that she is having second thoughts about her relationship with Tanaka because, among other reasons, she noticed he has two cel phones, which is fishy.
Getting brushed off by Tanaka when she wants to have "a talk" with him, she goes late at night to his place (a very nice place, by the way) where she snoops around after he tells her on the phone he is not there and sees him with some guy. This guy is likely a dope dealer or something bad, because there is a big pile of money on a table. The two see her and Tanaka whips out a gun and takes her to some place deep (like really deep) in a forest where she is tied up to a chair.
When Bonnie doesn't show up for class the next day and doesn't respond to Grover's phone calls, he is distraught. While the trope of a cast member who has become over-concerned with what a young woman related to them is up to has been dealt with ad nauseum with Danno, Grover's reaction is well-founded because of the promises he had made to Bonnie's father Mike. Grover even breaks down in tears at one point and he gives Tani a very nasty chewing-out for not telling him about "the boyfriend" (for which he apologizes later).
When it's mentioned around the Supercomputer that Tanaka was Bonnie's boyfriend, Adam has a total "mackerel in the face" moment, suggesting that he had no idea that Tanaka was connected to HPD. It's up to Adam to fix things in a Ray Donovan-like manner. He goes to the blue-lit room where Tanaka has been grilled about Bonnie's disappearance, to which he gives sort of logical explanations as what happened to her, and takes the guy out of the place. This struck me as odd -- does Adam have the keys to the handcuffs or whatever keeps suspects locked to the chair in the room? Luckily for the rest of Five-Zero there are security cameras showing what Adam did.
Realizing that Bonnie is in serious peril, Adam calls Kenji and there is a tense conversation between the two. Adam wants Bonnie released and he will give Kenji Tanaka in exchange. A couple of Kenji's goons are at the middle-of-the-forest shack and Bonnie looks like she is a goner. She is literally saved by the ringtone and an exchange is soon made for the two. Grover and McGarrett show up and, of course, Grover is extremely relieved that Bonnie is OK. What happens to Tanaka is a good question, and it is likely Adam will have some serious 'splainin' to do when he gets back to the office.
MORE TRIVIA:
- There are chickens near the HPD rifle range!
- Tanaka's birth date is 07/21/1998, he is 5′10″ and weighs 175 lb. His Social Security Number is 951-77-1824, his drivers license number is HR6640123M, his phone number is 888-555-0197, and his address is 117 Kalawao Avenue, Honolulu 96816.
- When Tani and Bonnie are having their chat, they are drinking Shaka Pineapple Mint herbal tea.
- An interesting weird-sounding music cue near the end just before Siobhan cuts the ropes that are binding her to the chair using a piece of metal sticking out from another chair.
This episode was OK, but it would have gotten three stars if the way tasks connected with solving the crime of the week were accomplished with a speed that wasn't beyond ridiculous.
Lorena Massey (Marika Dominczyk), whose husband, Prin Khomsiri, was a high-ranking diplomat with the Thai Consulate, is arrested for killing him with a hammer. She called the cops herself! The evidence suggests very strongly that she really did this. Interrogated at HPD, she says this was because of her husband's constant abuse. (There actually is a Thai Consulate in Honolulu, by the way -- I wonder if they cleared this show with them first in any way?)
Danno is suddenly an expert on domestic violence, dating back to when he was a cop in New Jersey. He doesn't believe that Massey really killed her husband because her explanation suggests pre-meditation rather than self-defense. Danno thinks she is covering up something, though all the evidence they amass makes it look like this is an open and shut case, including cel phone records, text messages, credit card purchases and so forth.
Quinn has a brainstorm because her niece has an app on her cel phone which she uses to hide text messages and pictures from her parents. Finding such an app on Massey's phone, disguised as "Calculator," it reveals over 6,500 messages between her and a Dr. Ray Paulson (Houston Rhines), who has been counselling and treating her and in the hours before her husband's death, texted her "If he hurts you again, it'll be the last thing he does."
Hauled into the blue-lit room, Paulson says he did not kill Massey's husband. He tells them, "she's a patient, and a married one at that ... which is why it never became physical." Five-Zero's digging shows he had an alibi for the time the husband was knocked off. Massey is shocked when she hears that Paulson is not the killer, because she suspected he was and her big act that she was the killer, including wiping down the bloodied hammer, was just a coverup to save his ass.
So Massey seems to be not guilty of killing her husband. But suddenly people from the State Department get involved, because Thailand wants to extradite Massey, who they say renounced her American citizenship. She says the papers concerning this are totally phony, manufactured by her late husband, but they are considered "official documents." A woman from HPD named Yang (Sumalee Montano) is in charge of the extradition, and Five-Zero is overridden in every way. (It says on certain WWW pages – like this one -- that the wife of a diplomat also has diplomatic immunity, but I guess it doesn't work if the wife murders her husband.)
Just as Yang and State Department dudes are walking down the hall to get Massey, she is spirited out of the back door of HPD headquarters by Danno with the help of Duke!! (Poor Duke, won't he get in big shit for this? Surely there are surveillance cameras at HPD headquarters that would have recorded everything.)
Massey is taken to a "safe" house in a truck thanks to Kamekona and some of his pals, but how did all this get arranged within minutes? This place is not particularly "safe" at all, because the State Department and Yang are able to figure out where it is almost immediately. Danno doesn't understand how they did this, since he was using a burner phone from Kamekona's cousin, but McGarrett tells him, "They weren't up on the burner, Danny. They were up on HQ. On the secure line. Which is kind of terrifying to me." Danno and Massey are handcuffed and taken away but Danno is soon released soon thanks to McGarrett's usual behind-the-scenes machinations.
McGarrett calls in some favors (someone must really owe him big time) and digs up dirt on Khomsiri, who moved to Hawaii after a brief diplomatic career in Mumbai, India. Turns out that while there he killed a female pedestrian while driving under the influence of booze and then claimed diplomatic immunity. Not only that, McGarrett says he engaged in other criminal activity: "This guy had DUIs, he harassed women. But more importantly than any of that, he was selling visas to the highest bidder."
A petal from a bouquet in Massey's house is connected to a floral delivery, and guess who was delivering the flowers? Sameer Katri, husband of the woman in India, who is out for revenge. He arrived in the USA, specifically Oahu, on January 19, 2020.
There is something very peculiar with regard to this "petal," however. It is speculated that after Katri killed Khomsiri, he took the bouquet he was using as part of his "disguise" (which is where the petal came from) back with him when he left the house. Quinn is delegated to "send a couple officers back down to that area and have them ask around and see if anybody noticed a delivery guy leaving that house this morning with a bunch of flowers." This is done, and Massey's neighbors manage to produce a sketch of Katri which is used to verify who he is, comparing it to a tribute page for his dead wife on the Internet, all done within mere seconds.
On the morning of her husband's murder, Massey was at a yoga class which ended around 7:30, and the time of his death was estimated at between 8:15 and 8:30 a.m., giving her more than enough time to commit the deed (though we now assume she didn't). But at the beginning of the show, Massey receives a bouquet as "Love in the Air" by John Paul Young plays in the background, and I started saying "Uh-oh, IRONY WARNING!! Something bad is gonna be seen in a few seconds!!" At that point, Massey's husband is already dead, with blood pouring out of his head all over the floor. So who sent the delivery of flowers which we see at the beginning of the show then? Was it from the doctor? Or her abusive husband, flip-flopping between being nasty and nice, who ordered it feeling guilty about beating her up? Five-Zero doesn't pursue the angle of the second bouquet at all.
With only minutes to spare before Massey will be put on a plane to Thailand where she will likely be prosecuted for murder and maybe even executed, McGarrett drives ahead of the State Department SUVs and blocks their path. When he reveals the dirt on Khomsiri that they have learned in the last few minutes and says that all of this news would make a nice story for the newspapers which will badly damage the USA's relationship with Thailand, "a strategic U.S. ally, key to protecting our security interests in the region," Yang and the State Department boys suddenly start listening and abandon the extradition of Massey.
The secondary story of the show involved Tani and Noelani, the latter of whom has been taking surfing lessons. The two of them stop at a convenience store and suddenly the place is taken over by a guy and his girlfriend, both of whom have guns. The cops show up and everything degenerates into a hostage scenario. But then the guy has an epileptic seizure, which prompts Noelani to help him and Tani to offer some advice after identifying herself as a cop -- that if the two of them give themselves up, the guy, who was robbing the store because he had no money to pay for his medical treatment, would go to jail, but he would get all the medical attention he needs there! This is sort of like the argument that poor people should commit crimes so they go to jail where they get three square meals a day at taxpayers' expense!
Adam, after enduring some stern words outside the office from Grover -- "You put my niece's life at risk. It's gonna take me a while to get over it." -- is shown in this episode back around the "table" with the rest of the team, and when he finds out about Tani and Noelani's dilemma, rushes to help them, overcoming the SWAT team commander's desire to storm the convenience store, saying that the two women have been there for "several hours." I don't think so!
Adam is also seen at the end giving some intel connected with HPD to a character connected with the local yakuza as part of the deal he made with the bigwig in Japan. This is kind of dumb -- wouldn't Adam leave an electronic "paper trail" if he was using some Five-Zero computer (or any computer) to dig up this information?
Because the show was actually broadcast on Valentine's Day this year, we had to endure one of the usual tiresome holiday tropes which this show cannot avoid (Hallowe'en, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine's Day, etc.). The beginning of the show had an kitchen-gument between Danno and McGarrett at the latter's place as he was ironing his shirt in preparation for a date that evening, Danno criticizing the way McGarrett was doing the ironing, to which McGarrett said "Would you like to do this for me? Or you just want to sit there and be annoying?" The rest of the conversation was the usual drivel.
I dreaded the end of the show because the crime of the week had been resolved around 38½ minutes into the 40:29 running time. As cast members, meaning as many can be crowded into McGarrett's living room as possible, prepared to watch the movie Love Actually ("the Citizen Kane of romantic comedies"), McGarrett snuggled up to his new girlfriend Brooke (whom we have seen before in S10E01), also putting his arm around Danno's shoulders, thus causing the hearts of the McDanno types to get all a-flutter.
MORE TRIVIA:
- The yoga session Massey was at was held at 975 Papela Drive, Honolulu 96816.
- Massey's bogus credit card that she used the evening before to pay at the hospital was
6576 4858 5453 . I'm sort of wondering why she would have paid anything, surely the consulate would provide benefits for her and her husband. Quinn says the card was used "just after nine," but there doesn't seem to be a time on the info from the credit card company.- Paulson's home address is 865 Kukuapalani Avenue, Honolulu 96825. His drivers license number is HT3255196L.
- Who is "Manti"? Noelani's boyfriend? If this is mentioned on Magnum, PI, I am not going to watch that show to check this out!
- Sameer Katri's birthdate is 3/17/1976.
The multi-part show this week was like "old home week," with UK spy Harry Langford (Chris Vance) reappearing. The March 13th show will be the same, with art expert/crime scene cleaner Gerard Hirsch (Willie Garson) showing up, augh.
Harry's presence in this show was really unnecessary. The CBS press release for this show said that he "helps Five-0 investigate a series of murders that follow the plot of a fabled unpublished crime novel from the 1920s." But did he?
Harry has written a book which he says is "based on my experiences with a generous dollop of artistic license thrown in." He is in Hawaii at the Oahu Literary Festival to hype this book. He tells McGarrett and Danno he dashed off the book in a "couple of weeks," submitted it to a publisher and got a "seven-figure book deal," which means some amount between $1,000,000 and $9,999,999. Based on the expression "seven-figure," Danno asks Harry if someone gave him a "million" dollars for his book, and Harry replies it was "two million." Later Harry says he got a "million dollar advance."
Harry tells McGarrett and Danno "MI6 regulations state that I can't appear at any of these book events, in case my face ends up in the papers," but Harry is at one of these book events (the Oahu festival, DUH!), where someone could easily take his picture with a cel phone camera or whatever. Stupid!
At this festival, there is an actor named Gabe Darsyk (Jack Cutmore-Scott) who Harry hired to impersonate him at book signings pretending to be his "literary alter-ego" Michael Blanton. Obviously this guy is going to get kidnapped (just like Harry himself would be) and, sure enough, that's what happens. Harry becomes guilty about causing this guy's dilemma and concerned about rescuing him, eventually freeing him with the help of Tani and Junior, the latter having returned from his naval reserve duties. Harry gives the kidnappers not one or two million dollars, but ten million (don't ask me to explain this), which is expropriated from its bad-guy recipient in the Cayman Islands by Harry's very attractive girlfriend named Maria (Eva De Dominici). She becomes Harry's ex-girlfriend by running away with all the cash, and all Harry can say is "Oh, dear."
The crime of the week had to do with an unfinished mystery book from 100 years ago which is being finally published by Suzanne Ridge (Suzanne Cryer), an expert in the writings of its author, Maureen Townsend, played by Nicole Steinwedell in a flashback at the beginning of the show. There are some very gory murders suddenly occurring in Hawaii which parallel happenings in the book which McGarrett, Danno and Grover soon enough figure out have been committed as a publicity stunt for the book by Ridge and her assistant Kevin Tapley (Taylor Kowalski). The character of Ridge was obnoxiously perky, and it didn't take long to figure out that she and/or Kevin were responsible for the recent killings.
The other sub-plot for the show, one which will just not die, had to do with Adam and his dealings with the yakuza. The "previously on" for the show contained material which we have already seen in a "previously on" two episodes ago and the show itself. (Don't the producers of this show think people have been following this?) At least this week when this material ended, there was a line of text on screen referring us to "new" material, which was actually concerning the mystery book in 1920.
Near the end of the show, Adam is shown to have set up a trail camera somewhere in the middle of a forest, perhaps one of the forests where he has been seen in recent episodes. Using this camera, he captured scenes of local yakuza boss and Adam's mortal arch-enemy Kenji executing his own godson Endo Tanaka (see S10E15) and some other dude to whom Adam was seen giving intel from HPD who told Adam to "watch your back" (see S10E16). Think about it -- how would Adam know that out of all the acreage in this forest, he should put his camera in the exact spot where Kenji would be knocking off both of these guys so they could be captured on video?
After viewing the footage, Adam says "Got you," but at the very end of the episode, it looks like a bunch of yakuza goons are on their way to Adam's place right now! Still, there is hope, because the press release for next week's show says, "Adam finally gets the evidence he needs to take down the Island's Yakuza operation once and for all." Whew!
The show had yet another one of those tiresome beery conclusions, since everything was wrapped up with about four minutes to go. Various members of the cast stood on a hotel balcony watching fireworks go off while sipping brew, which was a big waste of time. Junior and Tani were a little more friendly than usual, because after Junior's return, the two of them finally "did it" in Tani's tiny car on a beach.
The "previously on" for this show has the third "previous" appearance of the Yakuza kingpin in Tokyo. Enough already and enough with this whole sub-plot, which is one that is loathed by pretty well everyone!
I think we might have achieved that objective, because, despite the fact that a bunch of masked goons dropped into visit Adam, he was able to dispatch them all. I would like to know how Five-Zero was aware of "shots fired at Adam's building," though ... do all of Adam's neighbors have Five-Zero on speed-dial?
The team with Adam soon go to Kenji's place and there is a firefight where the bad guys can't hit anything as usual. Adam and Kenji end up in a martial arts duel and Adam has a lot of trouble not killing his mortal arch-enemy. Kenji is turned over to the cops, threatening to tell them all sorts of dirt about Adam, who says "I'll take my chances."
McGarrett is still pissed at Adam, though I am pissed that McGarrett can still not pronounce "yakuza" correctly! McGarrett says that Adam risked the reputation of Five-Zero by continuing to lie about things because of his plan to dismantle the local yakuza operation from within. He tells Adam to go and visit HPD Organized Crime Department and tell them all that he knows, and Adam agrees.
Please, no more Adam story!!
Noelani's uncle has died. She goes to Maui to the funeral where her parents are also in attendance. We find out that they are not crazy about the kind of work she does. She meets this guy named Mikala, a "councilman" (Max Phyo), which I guess has something to do with the local city government. I immediately felt "this guy is fishy," and, not surprisingly, he was the one who knocked off her uncle! Too bad my "sixth sense" for this kind of thing will soon be at an end, since the show is closing down forever in a few episodes.
Quinn is assigned by McGarrett to help Noelani deal with things after Noelani thinks that her uncle didn't die from a heart attack as the local medical examiner Ron Hidoko (Peter James Smith) put on the uncle's death certificate. Noelani gets herself all twisted in knots, and Quinn -- whose brother committed suicide, just like Mikala made it look like for her uncle (but we find out later it was murder) -- has some comforting words for Noelani along the lines of "we should remember people for the good things they did."
The uncle was a pastor who counselled people with drugs and other problems and hung around shady characters. Some guy named Eke Mahoe (Gregory Cruz) who tried to knock off the uncle years ago and served time for this is a suspect, but he is a red herring. The way Mikala gets linked to the uncle's demise is with DNA evidence found at the crime scene processed with the usual lightning speed.
The crime of the week had to do with some bad guys unloading heroin from a container ship just off Oahu. Members of the Five-Zero team fly to the ship and snoop around and Tani has a major kick-ass fight with one of the disguised-as-members-of-the-Coast-Guard-but-left-for-dead "pirates" in the ship's galley behind a locked door that McGarrett and Junior open only with some difficulty.
Back on land, the heroin is tracked down to a house where McGarrett, Danno and Junior participate in another firefight with some gangsters who obviously think the heroin is theirs. But white powder all over the place which flies up in the air thanks to the barrage of bullets the bad guys unleash through the rather thin-walled house is not heroin, but carfentanil!
The writers for this episode obviously didn't consult the usual proper sources, because carfentanil is much, much more dangerous than heroin (Tani says words to this effect after the shooting is over). Even touching this stuff, let alone breathing it (Danno is freaking out doing the latter during the gun battle) can be fatal. However, maybe the reason that Danno didn't die is revealed in this line from Wikipedia on this subject: "Despite its higher potency, carfentanil is less fatal than fentanyl in rats."
The show ended around 39:25 with over 4 minutes to go with the usual tiresome finale in the bar owned by Rick from Magnum, P.I. Rick, who had hot pants for Quinn in the recent crossover, is there and the two of them end up dancing together, competing with Junior and Tani.
MORE TRIVIA:
- Some good zingers: Tani to Danno, who was feeling seasick when they were on board the container ship: "He really puts the 'drama' in Dramamine"; McGarrett to Danno when the latter is complaining about the way McGarrett is ironing a shirt: "Is it boring being as predictable as you are?"
- Because McGarrett asks some questions of Amazon Alexa at the beginning of the show, this product gets a sponsor credit at the end of the show.
- By the way, where is McGarrett's hot date discussed at the beginning of the show (the hot veterinarian)? She doesn't seem to be at the bar at the episode's end.
This episode was the usual mish-mash, well done from a production point of view, but lacking elsewhere, especially the angle of the major sub-plot not really being about Five-Zero.
The “old home week” guest was Jimmy Buffett as Frank Bama, whipping up a batch of waffles in McGarrett’s kitchen, except McGarrett was nowhere to be seen. In Bama’s previous appearance (S09E25), he showed up to reminisce about Joe White and take Joe’s ashes which McGarrett gave him to Vietnam, so he and McGarrett got to bond over this. Junior, who is seen, has to listen to Bama’s advice about how his waffles helped “seal the deal with the love of [his] life,” and of course there is a reference to Junior’s current “connection” with Tani. Bama’s appearance was really unnecessary, but at least we didn’t get another “previously on” featuring Adam’s yakuza hijinks.
Adam is seen at the beach with Quinn, where the two of them have been surfing at Quinn’s invitation. Of course this starts out interesting, because Quinn is in a bikini, and I like to watch Katrina Law breathing. Adam flashes back to Kono when he says “I’m used to being second-best in the ocean,” because his “ex-wife” was a champeen surfer, as we may recall. Adam is still in McGarrett’s bad books, and Quinn tells him that she hopes he will soon be back on the team. The usual pre-credits phone call for serious business is received, but this time it is taken by Quinn, and the caller is her stepdaughter Olivia (Siena Agudong), who has a problem.
When Quinn goes to check on this, she finds that her ex-husband Jake has left the kid alone for a few days. Not only that, he previously took money to help support his gambling habit that Quinn gave Olivia that was intended for her cheerleading uniform! We knew nothing about this husband or Olivia before this show, and after Quinn drops Olivia off at school, she connects with Adam again, saying “I need to track someone [her ex] down,” figuring that Adam, with his vast knowledge of criminal enterprises on Oahu, is the man to help her. As the two are driving around, Quinn tells Adam that she is not much of a “sharing” person, which is interesting, because considering Adam’s recent activities, Adam and her are really birds of a feather.
Adam takes Quinn to some high-end back-room gambling den, where he talks to a woman named Maile (Gina Hiraizumi). Jake has been seen there, but not for a few days, because he “hit a bad streak.” They then go to someone who can really help them, Kamekona, who makes a call, saying “I always got friends in low places.” They track Jake down to a sleazy card game in Chinatown, where Quinn threatens to bust him big time unless he checks into a “program” to quell his gambling. Jake agrees to do this. Quinn is very emotional throughout most of this sub-plot.
The crime of the week had to do with the murder of Daniel Kekaula, a rancher whose property is somewhere in what Tani calls “Cow Poop Valley.” The apparent location of this place, which has lots of horses and cows, on or near the Kualoa Mountain Range, is interesting, because typically when a “ranch” is seen on the show (both old and new H50), it is fictionally located on another island.
Kekaula was running short of cash and decided to change his business to a macadamia nut farm after borrowing some money from the bank. However, when he started digging up the ground, he uncovered a treasure trove of gold Civil War coins which was buried by a previous owner of the farm a really long time ago. There is a back story to all this involving two feuding families, the Ho‘okanos and the Makois (note the same “initial” connection to the legendary feuding Hatfields and McCoys). This backstory is related in tedious detail by Kip Ho‘okano (Stephen Chang), whose great-great-uncle was involved.
When Kekaula started blabbing about his find in the Cattle Prod, a local bar -- a bar where Tani used to hang out and win line dancing competitions, which makes Junior sound jealous -- word quickly got to Raymond Makoi (Dave Reaves), one of the descendants of this feud (and a mean-looking SOB) who figured that he should be sharing in this loot, so he and some of his pals went to Kekaula’s place and brutally murdered him after unsuccessfully trying to find the location of the gold.
Having figured all this stuff out, Five-Zero finds itself at Makoi’s ranch which is located very close to that of Kekaula. No one is there, because the bad guys have fled ... on horseback. (How did they know that Five-Zero would soon show up?) In a process of elimination, Tani, Grover and Junior give joining McGarrett on horseback to follow these dudes a pass, so Danno is next in line. And he has been taking riding lessons recently with his daughter? (Puh-leeze!! I yelled at the screen when he said this.)
McGarrett and Danno bromantically ride up a hill following the baddies and into a forest where one of them named Kaipo (Mason Manuma) keeps trying to knock them off, but the foliage gets in his way as the two Five-Zero guys are having a “horse-gument.” McGarrett sneaks up behind Kaipo in a very clichéd manner, and they persuade him to co-operate which is far too easy. Kapio’s “Uncle Ray” and some associates (seven in total) are heading for a cabin and McGarrett and Danno find themselves in this place in the middle of a firefight similar to the one from the previous show where bullets were flying through a wall, causing deadly carfentanil to fly around the room. This time, there is just dust flying around the room.
Having dispatched almost all of the bad guys, McGarrett ends up in a nasty fight with Raymond, the nastiest of them, and is saved from certain death by Danno who has only one bullet left. HPD soon shows up to process the crime scene where there are bodies littered all over the place, getting there with ATVs, and the two boys from Five-Zero head down the mountain on their horsies, with McGarrett uttering some banalities about the soon-to-be-setting sun, which has just a bit of English 100 significance considering what will happen with the show in a few weeks, especially the line from McGarrett to Danno: “You’re gonna miss this when it’s done.” The sunset, by the way, is not particularly spectacular like the CGI one when Joe White passed away.
One thing I thought very peculiar. Why is it that Duke was at the conclusion of both the forest crime scene and when Quinn’s ex-husband was hauled out of the Chinatown gambling den, not to mention at another scene at Kekaula’s ranch which revealed dead bodies (during which it is raining heavily)? There are almost 1,900 cops in HPD in real life, it’s almost like Duke is the only guy working there!
MORE TRIVIA:
- Fred Helfing tracked down a couple of locations. The house where Quinn's ex lives is at 1695 Ua Drive in Palolo Valley, not Kaimuki. The
Chinatown gambling den is on Nuuanu Avenue. On the opposite side of the street is Worldwide Travel, a company no longer in business which is seen in a shot behind Adam in the show. On the side of the Worldwide Travel building is a ton of graffiti in the Google Maps view. It's not there in the episode. The Google Maps view is from last June. So, in the 6 months between the two views, it was either painted over or there was some studio magic done.- Kip Ko‘okano's address is 228 Lamolio Road, Kamuku 96731. His Social Security number is 967-29-9919 and his Driver's License is HG10774590.
- Quinn’s phone ring tone for her daughter is Rachel Platten’s “Fight Song.”
- Daniel Kekaula’s address is 650 Alima Road, Kahuku 96731, he owes the bank at least $360,800. His Social Security number is 951-22-1717, his macadamia nut business started 1/10/2020, his phone number is 808-555-0178.
- Other people who were at the bar with Raymond Makoi included Zoe Traventin, Noah Gajaista, Chris Drollavich, David Hidoko, Rob Levanfoth and Jamie Lipsberg.
The only two interesting parts of this show were the beginning and the end.
Amazingly, we had no "previously on" involving Adam and the yakuza. Instead, McGarrett was seen jogging at the beginning in a brief teaser while going through mental turmoil over the death of his father, Joe White and his mother. At the end of the episode, while listening to a tape from the toolbox where McGarrett's father says he hopes his son becomes "anything but" a cop, he gets an unexpected call from some lawyer in London who wants to hand-deliver a mysterious package connected with his late mother's estate, obviously tying in to what we shall see in the two final shows for the series on March 27 and
April 3. The "old home week" star returning for this show was art expert/crime scene cleaner Gerard Hirsch (Willie Garson). I can think of a lot of "beloved characters" I would rather see on the show tying up plot threads before the finale than this one. Hirsch was freaking out over his 78-year-old uncle Oscar who was recovering from heart surgery. Oscar had returned from Seattle to Hawaii where he used to live over 40 years ago, intending to move in with his nephew.
Snooping around Oscar's belongings which were shipped over from the mainland, Hirsch discovered an antique snuff box which, as an art expert, he figures is worth "hundreds [of] thousand[s]." Suspecting this was stolen, he gets Tani to investigate this box at HPD, where they find it was taken during a 1978 break-in at the house of Tabitha May, an old girl friend of Oscar's and also connected to the murder of her housekeeper who witnessed the robbery. (Hirsch actually goes with Tani to the evidence room at the cop shop.)
Hirsch swears that his uncle couldn't have been the killer, even though he was identified after the robbery as being Jay Gilbert, the "Casanova Conman," who not only scammed Tabitha, but four other women as well. (It is peculiar that no one tracked him down at the time, since there are pictures of Oscar as Gilbert in the HPD evidence box.)
Quite a while into their investigation, Hirsch has this big brainstorm that Uncle Oscar had a roommate, Stanley (Lawrence Pressman), who was a fence and quite likely is connected with this snuff box and other things too, like an antique gun stolen from one of the other women which was used to kill Tabitha's housekeeper. Tani and Hirsch go to visit Stanley, who brushes off his own involvement, except he makes a big goof, telling them that the housekeeper was shot dead through the eye, a fact about the case which was not released to the public. Duh! Stanley is busted when he tries to return the antique gun which he used to kill the housekeeper to Hirsch's place, incriminating himself when confronted by his old pal Oscar (of course, Tani is in the next room listening).
Intertwined with this sub-plot was Hirsch's maudlin attempt to be a relationship counsellor after Tani told him about how Junior, the new love of her life, had made her a fancy breakfast which she could not cope with (seriously).
With the usual 6 minutes to go at the end of the show, the Junior/Tani soap opera came to a head, with Tani telling Junior, "I know I - I don't talk about this a lot, but, you know, my - my mom left us when, when I was really young, and, uh, I think it ... I think it really screwed me up back then, and ... it still does. Any time someone's good to me, any time I start to like someone, like ... like, really like them, I g-get this fear that I'm gonna lose them because I don't deserve them. And so I self-sabotage, because if someone's gonna leave you, then it's better to be the one that ends it, right? And that's why my problem is you. Because you're so good and you're so kind and you're so lovely to me that every ... frightened and insecure bone in my body just ... just wants to blow it up before you do."
Please!! This was so cringeworthy.
The crime of the week was very confusing in the best Five-Zero tradition. Greg and Cynthia Dean (Jon Mollison and Andrea Bogart), a couple from Chicago, were the target of a team of crooks known as the "Fix-a-Flat" robbers who have been perpetrating robberies on tourists, except in this case, Dean gets knocked off. Grover suspects that Cynthia's behavior is very fishy after she also almost ends up dead from being shot while running away into a nearby forest. (For some reason, the two robbers don't pursue her.) It turns out that the couple was involved in smuggling diamonds.
There were lots of questionable things about this COTW:
- Dean started fighting with the robbers, ostensibly because they wanted to take his wife's wedding ring, but more likely because he didn't want to lose their suitcase which contained the jewels. Grover thinks there was some sinister reason behind the robbers committing murder, but the "Fix-a-Flat" robbers didn't know the couple had jewels, did they?
- As per a brainstorm McGarrett has, some guy from an airport bus was working in cahoots with the "Fix-a-Flat" duo. This bus driver would put a nail under the tire of some car at a rental agency, and then text photos of the car and its license plate to the robbers to track. But where were these crooks, were they waiting at the airport to follow the car? Even if they were staying somewhere near the airport, how would they know where the car is going? If this car wasn't driven until it was rented, couldn't the tire be already flat when the people rented it, otherwise wouldn't the tire quickly run out of air even if it was chosen right away, rather than running out of air in the middle of nowhere as happens on the show?
- Although Cynthia, after she is found almost dead, is taken to the hospital, she escapes from the place and uses a phone she stole from a nurse to contact Fetu Kahele (Kaleti Williams), a guy connected with local Samoan gangs on Oahu (and a nasty looking mother-you-know-what). She and Dean were supposedly going to deliver the diamonds to Kahele, but don't they do most of their business in Antwerp which McGarrett points out is a "hub for the global diamond trade"?
- The diamonds were in one of the Deans' suitcases in a lead-lined box, "So the X-ray machines wouldn't see what's in there." But what would be more suspicious for X-ray machines, diamonds (could it detect these easily?) or a lead-lined box (which might contain something weird like a bomb!). As well, there is a GPS tracker in the suitcase. What was the point of this? In case the suitcase got misdirected or something?
- Cynthia has her arm in a sling in the hospital (one of the robbers fired three times at her, and she says that she "was hit"), but this is nowhere to be seen at the end of the show when Cynthia has a gun and acts if she knows how to shoot it in a very "professional" manner.
MORE TRIVIA:
- Uncle Oscar is played by Michael Nouri, probably best known as the hunky boss/boyfriend of Jennifer Beals in the 1983 movie Flashdance. Tabitha is played by Patty McCormack, who was Rhoda Permack, the super-evil child in The Bad Seed (1956). Lawrence Pressman, who played Stanley, appeared in the 1973 Classic Five-O episode S06E08, "Why Wait Till Uncle Kevin Dies?"
- Another mention of Amazon Alexa, which Danno supposedly gave everyone as a Christmas present last year, though we are just finding out about people using them now. Grover tells Alexa to play something "upbeat" in his truck as he and Junior are driving. It responds by delivering "Walking on Sunshine."
- Adam tells Grover "It's good to be back," suggesting he has resolved his issues with McGarrett.
- The Deans live at 760 West Chestnut Street, Chicago 60610, phone number 312-555-0190. Greg was born 10/18/1979, Cynthia's birthday was 05/07/1982. Greg's driver's license number is L2188303947C, Cynthia's is L2138048661N. Their driver's licenses have the name of Jesse White, Secretary of State on them, who actually is the Secretary of State for Illinois.
I was thinking because this episode was the second-last show, that it would focus heavily on resolving various serious plot issues from the series, especially those to do with McGarrett's physical and mental health. There were some such moments, but the show was dominated by the usual convoluted and poorly-written crime of the week ... which involved yet another (and hopefully the last) kidnapping of the series.
There was probably some major editing going on with this show, because a new character in the form of Lincoln Cole (Lance Gross) was introduced. It was rumoured Cole was supposed to be part of the Five-Zero team if McGarrett and/or Danno were not going to be back next season (which they are not, since the series is ending next week).
Cole is a former Marine gunnery sergeant with the Fleet Anti-terrorism Security Teams, explained by McGarrett as "the Marines' dedicated security forces ... they deploy them around the world to handle threats, primarily counter-terrorism." Because Cole feels bad about an operation he was in charge of in Iraq which ended in the death of several of his men, he returned to Hawaii where he started his military career and basically went into hiding, working as a busboy in a menial restaurant job.
In the restaurant, two bank robbers abduct -- though not in a really obvious way -- Sylvia Yang (Diana Lu), one of the women customers, along with her young son Manu (Zayne Eveland) because one of the two thieves, Marc Acosta (John Orantes) received a nasty wound during a shootout in the bank and he wants Sylvia to "stitch" him up. Immediately I started thinking, "Huh, why would they choose her seemingly at random? Is performing this kind of operation something most women (or even men) could do? Did she look like a nurse or a seamstress or something?" Marc wants her to use her "first aid kit" for this, but, as far as I am aware, they do not usually contain a needle and surgical-quality thread.
They all go to Sylvia's apartment, which is presumably close to the restaurant, and then Cole unexpectedly appears at her door with a toy which the kid left while they were eating. In the screen of her nearby laptop, Cole can see that one of the bad guys is also there ... but conversely, the baddie can also see that Cole is at the door, duh! Cole gives Sylvia the toy and leaves, but seconds later, the door gets kicked in and Cole uses martial arts skills to kill Marc and the other robber flees. Which brings up another question -- how did Cole know where Sylvia lived? You might say "Well, he probably followed them from the restaurant," but did all this just coincidentally happen while Cole was on a break?
The dead Marc is taken to the medical examiner's office, where there is a big noise in the hallway when McGarrett and Danno are there, because Marc's brother Hector (Lobo Sebastian), the very nasty-looking tattooed mother-you-know-what-of-the-week wants to find out what happened to Marc. Hector is a member of the Sureños crime syndicate, a real-life gang. He is accompanied by a couple of thugs. I dunno how Hector knew that his brother was at the ME's office. McGarrett even tells him, "We never actually ID'd your brother, so there's no way you could have been notified [that he was dead]."
Soon after this, Tani has a heart-to-heart with Danno, voicing her concerns about McGarrett, which reveals for the first time on the show that the Five-Zero offices have a balcony! Danno tells her "I'm gonna get to the bottom of it, okay?", "it" meaning "McGarrett's problem."
Cole is IDd with the usual rapid DNA analysis from a toothbrush in his apartment, and he is seen fixing himself up in a hotel room that he broke into where there is a sewing kit (I have seen this myself in such a location). Bloodstains from this hotel room and cel phone records compared to people who Cole might know on Oahu also rapidly link him to a Sergeant Major Phillips (action star Chuck Norris, in a near-cameo appearance). (Puh-leeze, this is all sooooo far-fetched!!) When McGarrett and Junior show up at Phillips' place, Cole is hiding out, and he is taken into custody after a chase and more ass-kicking.
Cole is brought back to headquarters and Tani picks Junior's brains about McGarrett's current state. Junior replies, "McGarrett's the best soldier I've ever worked with. He's able to compartmentalize things, and if he's got something to deal with, he'll deal with it in his own way. All right? There's nothing to worry about."
In the blue-lit room, McGarrett attempts to break through Cole's shell, but he is interrupted by Danno because Sylvia and her son have been kidnapped by Hector who is threatening to kill them unless Cole surrenders to him by 5:00 p.m. There is no indication how Hector knew where Sylvia lived to grab the two of them.
Things get complicated, because military police show up and take Cole into custody, which McGarrett seems unusually powerless to deal with, telling Danno, "I don't think we have a choice in this one." Cole, however, manages to escape from the MPs by going ape-shit in the SUV they are using to transport him. Hearing about this, McGarrett tells Danno, "The MPs don't know where he's going, but we do," though Cole being told the exact location for the exchange never specifically happened in the show AFAIK.
Cole shows up at this location using a car which he stole from somewhere by hot-wiring it. There are tense moments as the exchange is made, but, not surprisingly, the team from Five-Zero show up nearby in typical fashion and knock off Hector and his cohorts using some artillery which looks even heavier than normal.
The show ends with McGarrett and Danno having beers-on-the-beach with McGarrett saying stuff like "You're my Danno ... I kind of feel like I've been protecting everybody except for myself ... I've been trying to distract myself with a bunch of things ... All I know is that ten years ago, I hit the ground running hard and I've been running ever since. And I feel like maybe I need a little time away to get some perspective, you know?"
However, even this "real conversation" cannot be resolved without an interruption. As Danno goes back into the house for more booze, he encounters some guy snooping around, looking for the cipher McGarrett's mother sent to him which was delivered at the beginning of the show by Michael Claypool, the attorney from England (Anthony Armatrading -- see the ending of the previous show). Danno also suddenly has martial arts skills, but the guy escapes. Fortunately, the cipher was not in the envelope the guy was attempting to steal, since McGarrett never put it back there after he received it that morning.
To be continued (and ended) next week...
MORE TRIVIA:
- Information from Cole's bogus drivers license: Michael Ellington (his alias), 2979 Olaelae Street #405, Honolulu 96815. Driver's license HB3550026Y, date of birth 03/15/85, 5′11″, 190 lb.
- Hector Acosta's info from his rap sheet: Social Security number 942-47-7995, drivers license HG5277659L, address: 875 Mitscher Road, Honolulu 96819
- A reporter for TV station KMZR is threatened on the street and forced to broadcast the video about Sylvia and her son being kidnapped. There actually is such a radio station with these call letters: "KMZR is a Regional Mexican formatted broadcast radio station licensed to Atwater, California, serving Merced, California."
"Through a dozen adventures which have had no resolution, we come now to the final act of this morality play."
Whoa ... sound of needle scraping across record! Wrong H50 universe!
Those are the words of Wo Fat (played by Khigh Dhiegh) in the last Classic Five-O episode ... which I recently re-viewed.
That episode was a major disappointment to close off the 12-year run of the original show, reducing everything to the level of a comic book, though by the time it got to that point, the show was seriously on the skids.
The reboot had not entered that territory yet. In fact, in my ratings, the tenth season turned out to be third best behind the first and second, even after I dropped the rating of this final episode a bit. I fully expected the reboot to go to at least 13 seasons, just so Peter Lenkov could brag that he had surpassed the original.
However, the new show was unexpectedly cancelled at the last minute, primarily because of Alex O'Loughlin's desire to end his participation because of the physical toll the show had taken on him, or so we were told. The season ten finale was not originally written as a series-ending show, and there was likely some major last-minute writing and editing done on it to make it so. Lenkov himself said in an interview there were around 12 minutes of material which should have been included that ended up on the cutting room floor.
I wonder, though, why he couldn't have gone to CBS and pleaded to let him make the very last show a 2-hour one? After all, the show was originally supposed to be two hours on April 3rd. It got cut into two parts, one hour on March 27th and one hour on April 3rd after the basketball game which was originally to have pre-empted the show on the 27th was cancelled because of the virus, so why couldn't they have kept the two-hour slot for the very last part, making a total of 3 hours?
Since the new Wo Fat (Mark Dacascos), who died in S05E07, had things connected with him which were at the level of a comic book (the claw, breaking out of Supermax), it was no surprise that he showed up in this last episode of the reboot with some crazy relevance dating back to the pilot episode. Not only Wo showed up again but also James Marsters as Victor Hesse, McGarrett's enemy from early in the series and William Sadler as McGarrett's father John. I was expecting some Return of the Jedi flashback which in itself had some "updating" compared to what was seen originally. Fortunately, this did not happen. None of these three characters seemed to have aged appreciably, by the way.
The crime of the week (or of the decade) had to do with Danno being kidnapped by Wo's wife Daiyu Mei, last seen in S10E11. She was after the cipher which McGarrett's late mother sent to him via an English attorney who made a trip all the way to Honolulu just to hand over one piece of paper with this code at the beginning of the previous episode.
This cipher, by the way, is supposed to be an "ADFGVX cipher" which the Germans were the first to use during World War I. However, what we see is a bunch of punctuation marks, whereas, according to Wikipedia, the cipher "is named after the six possible letters used in the ciphertext: A, D, F, G, V and X." Hmmm, looks like the final goof-up from the H50 writing staff!
At the beginning of this finale, McGarrett is on his way with Lincoln Cole (Lance Gross), the Marine gunnery sergeant who helped solve the previous show's crime of the week, to meet a guy Cole knows named Marshall Nang who can crack the cipher. But McGarrett suddenly gets a call from Danno who is being tailed and eventually kidnapped by Daiyu and her minions. McGarrett gets from the meeting place in the middle of nowhere to where Danno's car has been torched (without him in it) in all of 57 seconds!
Daiyu calls McGarrett (dunno how she knew his cel phone number) and says she wants the cipher (dunno how she knew McGarrett had the cipher) or else Danno, "the person that you care about most in the world" will die. Danno is hanging from chains in some hideout and he tells McGarrett not to help her. Just like in the previous show where Danno developed martial arts skills which have never been in evidence before, this time, he manages to pull himself up and unlatch himself from the chains in a McGarrett-like move, grab a gun from a guy he overpowers, and then try to shoot his way out, only to get a bullet in the chest before he gets to the exit.
McGarrett wants to turn over the cipher to Daiyu, even though Adam tells him not to, saying, "Right now you've got Five-O in your corner." Despite this, McGarrett goes to another out of the way location and gives it to her. He then rushes to 2342 Kapule Avenue, where Danno was being held and although seriously wounded, Danno is rushed to King's Medical Center.
Five-Zero then kicks into gear for the last time. Quinn and Cole go to Nang's place only to discover that he is not there. His car is tracked to an auto wrecking yard (uh, okay...) where he was crushed in his car in a manner similar to what happened to one of the characters in the classic James Bond film Goldfinger (seriously). It is speculated that Daiyu got him to translate the cipher and then knocked him off.
Meanwhile, Danno's condition is touch and go. McGarrett is seen in a scene in the hospital's chapel asking God to take him rather than Danno. The acting here is exceptional, but O'Loughlin has always done "serious" very well. When Danno wakes up, his sarcasm is of an almost gentle nature compared to usual. McGarrett gets a call from Cole saying that "we" cracked the cipher, which consisted of coordinates for a cemetery on the island.
The reason Daiyu wanted the cipher was because it contained a link to a pile of money that Doris McGarrett had left after she died, and Daiyu figured that her husband Wo Fat deserved all of it because he was related to Doris, though not biologically -- this was disproven in the show a long time ago! The cipher revealed the money was hidden in a mausoleum for Doris in the above-mentioned cemetery which we have never seen or heard of before -- for TEN FREAKING YEARS!!!
When Five-O goes to this place, the money is gone, but facial recognition from a nearby surveillance camera, conveniently pointed right at the mausoleum entrance -- duh! -- reveals one of Daiyu's men to be some dude named Roland Wu, and the location of his cel phone, which I guess is public domain, is figured out (a Five-Zero trope used for the last time ever -- PLEASE!).
This leads the team to the docks in a scene reminiscent of the one from the pilot episode where McGarrett dealt with Hesse. I don't really understand where Daiyu and her people were going -- even if they got off Oahu, wouldn't they be easy to catch after this? In the ensuing firefight (last one!) everyone is knocked off except Daiyu who shows tremendous broad-jumping skills in leaping between one container and another. Then, in a ridiculous finale, she suddenly knows how to operate the reach stacker which lifts containers and almost crushes McGarrett with one of them. Except, of course, he rolls free and then puts the drop on her from behind. She tells him with vaguely Darth Vader-like last words: "You are your father." McGarrett gets Cole to "book her."
There seems to be a huge gap in the story following this, but what is missing is sure to appear in the "deleted scenes" on the 10th season DVDs. We are on the beach outside McGarrett's place where he and Danno -- out of the hospital after only a week (!!!) -- are talking philosophically. It is obvious that McGarrett is heading out of town soon. There are fond comments between the two men, though I was not misting up over this, and a hug, after which McGarrett leaves poor Danno on the beach in a scene which reminds me of the expression "we left him sitting there," which I think ends with "crying in his beer" or something like that.
Inside the house, there are yet more adieus as other members of the team from the office appear, like Grover, Noelani, Tani, Adam, Quinn and Junior. No sign of Duke, Kamekona, Jerry (still on Oahu, I think) and other "beloved characters." This scene was full of emotion, because executive producer told the cast that the show was ending just before it was filmed. On his way out, McGarrett tells Cole, "Hold down the fort for me," an expression which means "take charge of things until I return."
The show ends with McGarrett on a plane heading for parts unknown, and suddenly, who should appear but his girlfriend Catherine. It turns out she was the one who cracked the cipher, thanks to the fact that Cole knew Catherine, which we heard about earlier in the show, and he knew that she was an accomplished codebreaker.
This was the only part of this show that I was waiting for, and I was not disappointed!
Thank you, @PLenkov, LOL...
MORE TRIVIA (LAST ONE!):
- Oops, I forgot, there was a sad farewell between McGarrett and Eddie in addition to the above.
- In the show before this, it was not shown how McGarrett got to the cemetery where he was reminiscing at his father's grave. (Someone suggested he took an Uber!) Danno shows up, the two of them talk on a bench, and then the two of them leave, McGarrett saying, "I'll drive." The two of them are shown arriving at the crime scene shortly after this in Danno's car. In this last show, Daiyu Mei is seen spying on the two of them from a distance. We can see McGarrett's
red truck . The two of them get up to leave, McGarrett points to his truck, but it looks like the two of them still leave in Danno's car.- To aid them in capturing Danno, Daiyu and her gang stole two vehicles from Roberto Vellonello (a bogus name which has been used on the show before). His address is 456 Amakihi Street, Honolulu 96816 and his drivers license number is HJ5640018T. The plates on the two vehicles are
BYT 367 and27 DQ5 .- Roland Wu, the guy from Daiyu's gang identified by facial recognition, lives at 87-232 Morison Road, Honolulu 96821. He is 34 years old and has charges of assault on his rap sheet.
- When told Danno can be picked up at 2342 Kapule Avenue, McGarrett tells Daiyu, "Doesn't work for me. You're gonna livestream him from my phone. I want the geostat data to prove he's where you say he is, and he's alive." This is done immediately and seems very far-fetched.
- United Airlines gets a credit for "production assistance" at the end of the show, first and only time this has been seen during the series, as far as I can recall. The plane McGarrett and Catherine are leaving on is a United Airlines Boeing 757 (thanks to Kurt). This airline was the default airline for similar assistance with Classic Five-O where its name appeared many times in the end credits.
- Does Catherine's appearance at the end of the show qualify as a deus ex machina ("god from the machine," which should really be deam ex machina ("goddess from the machine") in this case? The Wikipedia article on this plot device says it is used when "a seemingly unsolvable problem in a story is suddenly and abruptly resolved by an unexpected and unlikely occurrence. Its function can be to resolve an otherwise irresolvable plot situation, to surprise the audience, to bring the tale to a happy ending, or act as a comedic device." But ... "It is generally deemed undesirable in writing and often implies a lack of creativity on the part of the author. The reasons for this are that it does damage to the story's internal logic and is often so unlikely that it challenges suspension of disbelief [something the McDanno fans would agree with], allowing the author to conclude the story with an unlikely ending." But I am not complaining!
- Over and out!
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