Copyright ©2014-2017 by Mike Quigley. No reproduction of any kind without permission.
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The crime of the week in this show, "torn from today's headlines," had a drone attacking people on Diamond Head and on Waikiki, the latter vaguely reminiscent of the actions of the "terrorist group" in the original show's seventh season premiere The Young Assassins.
Despite the drone spraying bullets all over people at the beach, the number of people who were actually killed (7) or wounded (at least 19) seemed pretty small. One could say the same for later in the show when it was pursuing Danno's car which was acting as as bait, giving new meaning to the expression "couldn't hit the broad side of a barn door."
The drone was stolen from Venpax, a company located in Hauʻula on Oahu (how convenient for Five-0's investigation) which was creating drones under some kind of top-secret national security contract. The evil-voiced guy who stole and then programmed and operated the drone was Jonathan Redmond (Ned Vaughn), a former employee of the company, who had been fired some time before for stealing company hardware. After the recent attacks, he stupidly contacts Five-0 by phone, saying "America needs to be reminded what it's like to be terrorized," seemingly oblivious to the fact that his voice might have been on file with the company after he had made several threatening calls to them after his dismissal (which it indeed was). DUH!
Turns out that Redmond was working for the SRS, a Russian terrorist organization made up of former Soviet intelligence agents who were were trying to spirit one Lawrence Turner out of the country. The Edward Snowden-like Turner (and remember -- the real Snowden had a serious connection to Hawaii) was a systems analyst working for a local military contractor who the CIA discovered had used his security clearance to download thousands of classified documents. The drone attacks were a smoke screen for SRS types to land a plane on a downtown Honolulu street (I'm not making this up) right in front of Turner's place and provide the whistleblower with valet service to get out of the country. They were foiled by the Five-0 team, including conspiracy freak Jerry Ortega, who maneuvered another drone to fly into the plane as it attempted to take off, resulting in it crashing and exploding on the same street.
There were plenty of questions about this evil-looking black drone-like/stealth/Short TakeOff and Landing plane. First, are there any streets in downtown Honolulu which are straight enough to attempt these manoeuvres? Second, despite the fact that at the beginning of the show we saw a scene of a street with abandoned cars, there were no cars at all on the street where the plane landed and tried to take off. And finally, where did the plane come from? It's almost 4500 miles from Oahu to Russia. Did the plane come from an aircraft carrier somewhere? If so, why didn't local radar detect it? Or did the bad guys pick it up at the local Sinister Rent-a-Plane?
Relative to what else was going on in the show, I actually didn't mind the drone and related business, despite the general stupidity of things like the plane's landing and attempted take off. There was the usual clever deduction by Kono and an exciting shoot-up and takedown of the bad guys.
But the rest of the show was REALLY awful. When you get to 36 and a half minutes of the show with the crime of the week wrapped up and there are 7 and a half minutes left, you know there is a big problem.
Things were already bad at the beginning of the show, which had McGarrett and Danno taking part in an therapy session with a Governor-sanctioned psychologist which went on for almost four and a half minutes. It played like a "Previously on Hawaii Five-0..." segment where the two of them talked about how they got together, how they (don't) get along, and so forth.
As if that wasn't bad enough, we had a continuation of the Kono/Adam soap opera, which bookended the major story, starting with them acting lovey-dovey in a beach shower and ending with Kono thinking about becoming Adam's wife and concerned about their safety (so you know something horrible will be happening to them soon).
Then there was some baloney with Chin Ho visiting Gabriel, his brother-in-law in Halawa. You may remember Gabriel from S04E13 which, by the way, I had just watched a day before, confirming that this was one of the best Five-0 shows ever (also co-written by Lenkov and Solarz, the authors of this mess under discussion). When captured way back then, gang member-turned drug kingpin Gabriel offered Chin a bribe of $25 million to "walk away." Chin now wants Gabriel to sign an affidavit to the effect that he never received these funds, since HPD Internal Affairs still has a bug up their ass, as evidenced by some guy surveilling Chin at the beginning of the show as he is on his way to work in a shiny classic red Mustang, license number JGO 217. But you have to ask -- why would Chin have taken the money, unless it was just to stop him from killing Gabriel?
And then there are a couple of guys connected with Vintage Books, a store that Jerry was surveilling at the beginning of the show. They look at a picture of Jerry on one of their cel phones, saying words to the effect that if they can't figure out who he is, "this guy has be taken care of."
To top it off, the show closes with Danno finding some guy in his house who knew Danno's fugitive brother Matt. This guy, whose name is Marco Reyes (Anthony Ruivivar), says that the Matt "took something" that he wants Danno to help him get back. No doubt Gracie will be in peril again...
Puh-leeze, puh-leeze!
Seriously, I almost fast-forwarded through the last 7 and a half minutes...
MORE TRIVIA:
- McGarrett's explanation for why they hired Kono during the opening session: "We needed a female and she fit the bill."
- Jonathan Redmond's driver's license (number 593A175) reveals his address to be 3127 Pawlonia Street, Wakpahu, HI 96797. His date of birth is 11/13/1986, the license is to expire on 03/22/2015. His stats: 5'10", 180 lb., brown hair, brown eyes. The number on the employee card for Venpax, his former employer, is 79331965. His Social Security number as per his HPD criminal record is 977-43-8744.
- The local company that the SRS's money ($500,000 to Redmond alone) was funnelled through was Mahahehi Textile at 94-103 Truman Street, Honolulu 96802.
- Could all the people on the beaches have really been evacuated into their hotel rooms, houses, and so forth in two hours? What was to stop the drone from killing people in some place other than the tourist traps?
- The color scheme of Oahu was far too green at the beginning of the show.
- Vintage Books is located very close to Tea at 1024 on 1024 Nuuanu Ave. in Honolulu. While talking to McGarrett and Danno while doing his surveillance of this store, the owner of which he suspects of counterfeiting, Jerry refers to McGarrett as "McGruff," the crime fighting dog.
- Inputting the GPS coordinates for Redmond's controlling location that Jerry takes off the drone into Google Maps (21.288824 N, 157.852856 W) produces a location which is in the ocean off Ala Moana Park.
- There is new sponsor at the end of the credits, Kyo-Ya Hotels & Resorts, LP, but this is the name of the owner of several well-known Waikiki hotels, including The Royal Hawaiian, the Moana Surfrider and the Sheraton Waikiki, the last of which was already featured in the sponsors list in previous seasons.
- The original Five-O theme was heard briefly as the team arrived by helicopter at the Diamond Head shooting site at the beginning of the show.
This episode featured a kidnapping, perhaps the most popular crime category on the show (see review of Powa, S01E17, where I noted that of the first 17 episodes of the reboot, 9 were about kidnapping). The show recycled some familiar tropes, including Kono as confessor to kids, Danno as a concerned, sympathetic father and the usual red herring plot.
This time, Sophie Larkin, the daughter of a US SEAL lieutenant in Afghanistan, is kidnapped during a performance at her school (the bogus Punaloa Academy). Suspicion is this has something to do with compromising the operation her father is on, but Vice Admiral Graham Rhodes (Patrick St. Esprit), previously seen in S04E16, denies this is the case.
It turns out that Maggie Porter (Ocean Riley), another girl who was hanging out with Sophie prior to their show, was the intended victim of the kidnapper. Her parents Eric (William Mapother, formerly seen on Lost) and Caroline (Natasha Henstridge) are wealthy manufacturers of children's products, including car seats.
One of their car seats was defective and caused the death of a two-year-old girl whose father, Jason Hollier (Brian White) conspired with his late wife's brother and sometime criminal Michael Wiley, paroled six months before, to commit the kidnapping. Wiley used the access card of a substitute teacher, Ben Sutor, to get in to the school, though there is no logic to this, since the school was open for parents attending the show. There is also no indication why Wiley chose Sutor to get the card. Sutor is later found murdered by Five-0. This all seems a rather grand scheme, considering Hollier is an amateur criminal and Wiley is not a particularly sophisticated one either.
When the Porters get a phone call saying their daughter has been kidnapped, despite the creepy-voiced caller telling them not to call the police, they immediately do, and McGarrett and Danno arrive without trying to downplay their presence. Later when the kidnapper phones with more instructions, he knows that the police are involved.
The Porters co-operate with the kidnapper(s). Caroline takes a ransom of $1.6 million to a location on the Manana Trail, but it turns out that Hollier isn't interested in the money. Instead, he wants to kill Caroline because of the anguish his daughter's death put him through. Caroline covered up evidence that the car seats were defective and, unknown to her husband (this is hard to believe, considering the legal paperwork that was generated), paid off Alan Pollard (Gareth Williams), the chief engineer at their company, to avoid a trial. Pollard designed the car seat and after it was in production he realized that it was likely to cause injury and told the Pollards. It is interesting that the amount of ransom Hollier asked for was $1.6 million, perhaps because Pollard, wracked with guilt, had recently offered to give Hollier all the money he had received, which was this amount. Hollier had refused it.
The show began and ended with scenes involving Marco Reyes, the sinister character played by Anthony Ruivivar, now identified as "a prominent realtor in Colombia," who wants Danno to help him get $18.5 million that Danno's brother Matt stole from him. Reyes says that Matt told him that Danno knows where this money is, which Danno does not.
This show was a major improvement over the previous week's. The child actors were very good. I didn't much like Jerry Ortega's comic efforts helping the Five-0 team, taking time away from Kono (Grace Park looked VERY good, incidentally). The photography was above average. The music had a few palatable moments, but also a couple of offensive pounding cues.
MORE TRIVIA:
- According to teacher Ben Sutor's driver's license which was numbered 843R342, his date of birth was 04/17/79, he was 6'1" and he weighed 210 pounds.
- There is product promotion for Skype, sponsor Microsoft's instant messaging client.
- When Kono delivers a laptop to the Porters' house via the fictional Palm Shipping and Delivery service, the package shows that their address is 3169 Halenal, Honolulu 96815. On the package there is what looks like a phone number -- 5553272347 -- and a tracking number: 28839029-4992-WTS.
- Jerry is seen in a silly scene using an EMF (Electromagnetic Field) reader which monitors "telekinetic activity ... ghosts." This is in his mother's house because she has moved out to Maui to be closer to her family. Jerry refers to his mother as "Moneypenny" and later describes McGarrett as "Captain America." The scary bald-headed guy from last week's premiere episode, connected with the bookstore Jerry was surveilling because of suspicions of counterfeiting, is seen outside the house keeping an eye on him.
- The crash that killed Hollier's daughter was on Route 93 which, according to Wikipedia, "is a major east–west highway on the island of Oahu which begins as Interstate H-1 terminates in Kapolei and ends at Kaena Point on the extreme northwest end of Oahu, just past Makaha. It is part of the Farrington Highway. As H1 ends near Kapolei and Ko Olina, it continues as a four lane, and then two lane highway up into the Waianae and Makaha area, the 'Leeward Coast,' of west Oahu."
After an unusual (for this show) "previously on Five-0" segment rehashing threats to Danno regarding his brother, things begin with a trio of women robbing sightseers on a Waikiki Trolley tour bus. This idea is vaguely similar to the old show's seventh season episode A Woman's Work Is With A Gun. There three women desperately in need of money who met during "rap sessions" at the Oahu Women's Center became partners in crime. The threesome in the current episode, on the other hand, rob to support their surfing habit. All of them are disguised as skimpily-dressed tourist types wearing bikinis and attracting far too much attention from some of the men on the bus. (No one on the street seems to pay them much attention, though, when the women are yelling at people during the robbery and flashing guns and the bus has been pulled over to the side of the road.)
One of the passengers on the bus is Nathan Wagner, "president of a major I.T. security firm specializing in encryption, network administration and some type of high-tech firewall." He resists being robbed, and ends up with a bullet in his chest, falling over the double-decker bus's railing on its top level to the street below. It turns out that the three women have competition, because Vanessa Hansen (Erica Piccininni), sitting beside Wagner, had a gun pointed at him and was trying to get his co-operation in breaking into a bank using his cel phone (which one of the bikinied trio steals). After Five-0 arrives on the scene, Hansen pretends to be Wagner's wife Monica, who actually died of cancer five months before.
The old show's episode had some unrealistic forensic work by Che Fong, who blew up pictures to reveal information, and this show has Charlie Fong giving Kono equally far-fetched help, analyzing surf wax and sand in this wax left on the back of Wagner's shirt sleeve during his struggle with one of the robbers. (If you look carefully at this scene, it's debatable whether Keilani Makua (Sumire), the robber who shoots him, actually touches him in this area.) Charlie tells Kono this sand is found in the area of Diamond Head, so Kono is delegated to go undercover at that location since she is supposedly the least visible cop on the team. (But what about the business where she was charged with corruption a few years ago -- didn't this make the papers?).
Kono resists wearing some miniscule swim suit picked out for her by Grover. She soon arrives beside the three women who are waiting off Diamond Head for a wave. Keilani tells her to get lost. After they realize she is a cop (so much for Kono's big cover), Kono engages in a paddleboard pursuit and takes down Lea Nohoa (Allie Gonino) as the Five-O theme is heard in the background in the first of two appearances in the show. Back in the blue-lit room, Lea tells Kono to go to hell and asks for a lawyer.
Meanwhile, the ex-convict Hansen is busy tracking down the trio and trashing their hangout, trying to find Wagner's cel phone, just before Five-0 arrives on the scene. Though Lea is still uncooperative, Five-0 managed to find out about this place through her bellhop cousin who was the one who marked the clothes of intended victims at the Kahala Resort & Spa with some kind of invisible ink. The girls have fled to a "safe house" owned by one of their grandparents ("tutu") in Waimanalo, and Five-0 finds out about this place by telling Lea (who finally cracks) that her pals may be in serious danger. How Hansen finds out about this location (or even the previous one) is never revealed, but she arrives there and shoots Keilani in the stomach. Five-0 shows up, arrests Hansen, and takes the two girls into custody. Keilani survives and this part of the show ends with the threesome on their way to the clink as Kono has a ridiculous narration worthy of Jack Webb in Dragnet. All that is missing is some stern music in the background.
Since the show at this point has seven minutes to go, we continue with the shaggy dog story of Jerry surveilling a bookstore where he suspects the owner of counterfeiting, or as the supposedly serious TV site of cartermatt.com described it, "counter fitting." Jerry has already tried to convince McGarrett that his suspicions are serious, but left the Five-0 office in a pouty mood when rebuffed. Later he makes up with "McGruff," who enlisted the help of the Secret Service in giving the bookstore a clean bill of health. Jerry gets the help of Kamekona with a motivational speech about his "brilliant engineer" father who -- like Pollard in the previous episode -- was paid to shut up about job-related complaints. Kamekona, who describes himself as a "visual" rather than a literary kind of guy, sells a rare book containing a hidden microphone planted by Jerry to the store. I really can't figure out where this plot arc is going, and Jerry's Max-like humorous take on dealing with serious issues is really starting to put him in the category of a character that causes you to cringe every time he appears, like some people experienced with Catherine (who I liked) and Lori (who I did not).
The show bookends with Danno trying to track down either his brother or the $18 million his brother stole. The idea here is to shut up the smirking Marco Reyes, who keeps harassing Danno, even though Danno persistently punches him in the stomach every time he sees him. Using a postcard his brother Matt sent him before he disappeared overseas, Danno figures out that the money is buried between palm trees with an island in the background in a scene which I and many others found highly reminiscent of the finale of the classic comedy-to-end-all-comedies, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Danno digs up the money and the show ends.
MORE TRIVIA:
- The sound mix in this show was very bad at a couple of points, so incomprehensible with the ordinary stereo version of the show that I had downloaded that I then got a Dolby Digital version which was not much better. Near the beginning, the bad sound didn't help the explanation that new medical examiner Mindy Shaw gave of how she figured out Wagner was the trio's intended victim because of something called "ALS." She passed a flashlight-like device over Wagner's shirt, revealing an "X" on the shirt in conjunction with some UV glasses. Is this procedure and its name something that the general public is expected to know? According to WWW pages dealing with this acronym, there are hundreds of possibilities: Advanced Light Source, Ambient Light Sensor, Alternate Light Source, Advanced Launch System, Active Laser Seeker, Advanced Laser System, American Light-wave System, etc. Some of Kono's discussion about the surfing wax with Charlie Fong was also near-impossible to understand.
- What's with the Five-0 team's attitude to Shaw taking on the case without Max's help, and McGarrett addressing her as "kid"? You have to ask if McGarrett thinks he is like her father or something. I didn't find this scene particularly sexist, but awkwardly written.
- The song in the background as Keilani, dressed like Paris Hilton, is shown walking down the street at the beginning of the show is Let's Go by Tiësto. I thought it was pretty funny how her high heels kept her from coming down the bus's stairs quickly after the shooting.
- Hansen's criminal record shows her address as 1432 N. Camac St., Philadelphia 19123.
- The phone number for the Secret Service agent Eric Keane (Zurich Solomon) that McGarrett talks to is 202-555-0143.
- The second instance of the Five-O theme is after the takedown of Hansen and the two women at the end of the show.
- Waikiki Trolley is a real company. A look at their tour buses on their WWW page suggests that the top of their buses normally has some kind of metal frame over the seats (unlike on the show), perhaps where a cover can be put if it is raining.
- Grover has a good suggestion that the team try to track down the location of the tourists' stolen cel phones via their GPSs, but this is seemingly never followed up.
- Classic Five-O star Al Harrington appears briefly as his recurring character Mamo, who has a Surf Rental business. He uses the expression "kanaka maoli" in referring to the three surfing robbers, meaning "native Hawaiians."
- Hansen, pretending to be Wagner's wife, goes to the morgue and, according to Grover, takes Wagner's thumbprint. But does this mean she physically cut it off his thumb or just took a fingerprint? A closeup of the thumb reveals it is covered with something blue which could be ink (it does not look what you would expect), but what good would a mere fingerprint do her if she was trying to match it up with the thumbprint reader on Wagner's yet unrecovered phone?
- Here is Kono's big speech at the end. Talk about bad writing: "For them, life as they knew it was simple. It was waking up every day with a desire to catch a better wave than the day before. The adrenaline you feel paddling out, knowing that at any time you could get the ride of your life. And then there's the rush of walking on water. Only gods do that. Everything they did was to preserve that life. To surf is to get up every day with a desire to battle something greater than yourself. And those girls just wanted to ride that wave as long as they could. And now their endless summer is over."
Lots of people fawned over this episode, and Peter Lenkov, co-writer with Ken Solarz, almost broke his arm patting himself on the back because of what he thought of it. (Twitter: "Ending of 504, tonight's ep, is one of the best we've ever done. Career highlight for sure.")
I didn't find it that great.
The crime of the week was outlandish. Hit man Joseph Stegner (operating under the name Gordon Bristol, played by Lee Tergesen) comes to Hawaii, and, despite the fact he is kind of mild-mannered-looking, manages to overpower five law enforcement officers who detain him because he was carrying some heavy artillery in his suitcase.
Stegner escapes from the cops and is eventually tracked down by Five-0 using the usual security camera/facial recognition techniques. He is just about to be arrested when he is shot dead by another hit man, Nick Mercer (Timothy V. Murphy). Both of them work for the same Detroit mob family, the Bagosas. This has Five-0 scratching their heads since they can't understand why one hit man would take out another in this fashion.
Mercer, also known as Valentine (because "he has no heart," according to the mainland's Special Agent Chapman (Alysia Reiner)) was wounded by McGarrett when he shot Stegner. He commandeers an ambulance, leading to a chase by McGarrett and Grover in the Chevy Silverado, which performs in a rather gutless manner (not good P.R. for General Motors).
When finally captured, Mercer proves to be a hitman with a heart -- literally. He received a heart transplant after a car crash a while back, and suddenly had a major attitude change, finding himself unable to kill people as per orders from Albert Bagosa (Carmen Argenziano), boss of the crime family. Feeling unusually magnanimous towards his intended victims, Mercer set up an elaborate witness protection-like scheme which just happens to be located on the west side of Molokai (how convenient). All of the people he was paid to knock off are living in a LOST-like compound, far away from the prying eyes of the world. Stegner was coming to Hawaii to kill these people.
Word of Mercer's second near-death experience reaches his employer Bagosa, who arrives by jet on Molokai to the tune of "Taking Care of Business." He is accompanied by several well-armed thugs and all of them intend to wipe out the people in the secret compound. But Five-0 (and Mercer) beat them to this location and mess up their plans big time with the silly help of Jerry providing electronic "diversions." Mercer even stops Bagosa from killing McGarrett. But because Mercer was really a bad guy, he is taken away at the end of the show. Maybe he will get some kind of special consideration, despite the fact that he supposedly killed at least 100 people?
The big deal about this show getting Lenkov and others excited was the resolution of the business with Marco Reyes threatening Danno and his daughter over $18.5 million which Danno's brother Matt stole from him. The episode began with yet another "previously on Five-0," taking up a minute of time. I don't know why they have done this for the last two shows, but rarely did it otherwise, except for premiere episodes after the previous season's cliffhanger. Did someone finally figure out that if the show is in syndication, it might be difficult to follow these soap opera-like plots?
If the show hadn't already reached its quotient of preposterousness with the admittedly original crime of the week, I might have been a bit more sympathetic towards the conclusion of this Danno arc. But once again we have Jerry and Kamekona providing comic relief, Danno getting emotional, flapping his hands and talking to people while not looking at them, and Chin Ho finally getting $5.5 million to give Danno from his brother-in-law Gabriel (tsk tsk) in exchange for getting him moved to a better prison (Gabe isn't doing well in Halawa because he is tagged as being related to the cop Chin). This extra money is needed because, for some reason, Matt's money which Danno dug up last week was $5.5 million short of the $18.5 million Reyes had requested.
Danno and McGarrett fly off to Colombia to meet up with Reyes in some favela shithole (I thought they were going to just meet him on Oahu). They are taking the $18.5 million with them which, if it was in $100 bills, would weigh well over 400 pounds. Does their "immunity and means" extend to them, two white guys, arriving at a Colombian airport carrying this cash in huge bags? The reaction of the customs people and cops would probably be considerably greater than that of the law enforcement types who detained Stegner at the beginning of this show.
Reyes takes the money and "rolls out the barrel" which supposedly contains Matt's body (though we never actually see this). Predictably, this freaks Danno out and after he and McGarrett leave, there is the off-screen sound of fighting and gunshots when McGarrett (and Danno?) supposedly overpowers the guards (also heavily armed) who admitted them into Reyes' presence. Danno returns and puts a bullet into Reyes head ... in other words, committing murder (tsk tsk).
There is plenty of speculation as to where the show is heading now (and don't forget Chin has extra money floating around, since McGarrett and Danno will take the $18.5 million back, I am sure). Does this mean Scott Caan will be leaving the show or his character will be having yet more emotional turmoil in the future? Stay tuned...
MORE TRIVIA:
- Five-0 should get to the rifle range for some practice. It's the second show in a row where they can't shoot out the tires of an escaping vehicle, instead blasting the rear window.
- The closed captioning for this show was pretty funny (I was watching some of it on Global TV in Canada). Important dialogue was not translated, but things like "engine roaring" were.
- Jerry and Kamekona are both now seen surveilling Vintage Books outside the store, kind of a dumb move since both of them are now known to the store owners, Jerry because of his previous surveillance, and Kamekona because he sold the store a book from Jerry last week.
- Danno refers to Reyes as a "son of a bitch."
- Prior to Mercer hijacking the ambulance, he threatens its driver and his assistant after they offer to drive him to the Straub Clinic, a real Honolulu hospital.
- OK production values, good stunt work with "O'Loughlin" running between cars and up on to the hood of a cop car, music was nothing special, the episode was directed by Peter Weller.
Yes! A good show, and not only that, the music was good -- both worthy of 3½ out of four stars. The writer for this show, Eric Guggenheim, had written a couple of mediocre episodes -- McGarrett and his ninja momma in the elevator shaft (S03E23) and Catherine in Afghanistan (S04E21), but he also wrote the Carol Burnett show (S04E09), which was above average.
As the show begins, McGarrett goes to visit his father's grave on the anniversary of his murder, September 20th (also the date of the pilot episode of both the old and new shows). He encounters Ellie Clayton (Australian actress Mirrah Foulkes), who is also paying her respects. Her father Paul was murdered years before in the Aces High bar which he owned, and the senior McGarrett (William Sadler), who is seen in numerous flashbacks, was not only in charge of investigating, but took the orphaned Ellie under his wing. Ellie is now a deputy prosecutor in Honolulu.
No one was ever charged with the murder of Ellie's father, so McGarrett reopens the cold case. Five-0 revisits people who were suspects at the time and digs up evidence. Paul Clayton's body is exhumed to get fragments of bullets which are examined by Max and Mindy Shaw as the music takes a dive with some crappy pop tune heard for a few seconds. A homeless guy named Ned Burrows (Nick Searcy) leads them to the stolen cashbox from the bar which he recovered in a dumpster and later hid in a building behind Leonard's Bakery (a Honolulu landmark). Amazingly, the box is still there. Kono looks up a card found in the cashbox and references it in the "HPD Symbol Images Database." (Really?) It turns out to be for membership in an underground gaming room called the Paradise Den where Paul Clayton was involved in gambling and where he pissed off some heavy duty dudes who hung out there, including members of SVL, a Samoan street gang.
O'Loughlin's McGarrett has a Jack Lord-like brainstorm when he realizes that Paul Clayton's murder was not because of a robbery, but a hit which was made to look like a robbery.
Jordan Lewis (J.R. Lemon), a meth dealer who argued with Clayton before his murder, is sprung from Halawa and wired. He is sent to rattle the last suspect on the list, Jimmy Sykes (Stephen Bauer, recently known for the TV series Ray Donovan and Tony Montana's pal Manny Ribera in the 1983 remake of Scarface). This unorthodox move backfires, because Sykes shoots Lewis in the chest after Lewis flies off the handle recalling how his junkie mother was in debt to Sykes years before. Fortunately, Five-0 is nearby in the Takahamo Cleaning and Restoration van and arrives quickly on the scene.
Danno did not appear in the show at all. McGarrett was seen talking to him on the phone at one point, wondering "how is the family holding up," referring to the traumatic events of the previous episode. Grover and Kono showed up briefly to help with the investigation, getting some unexpected insight from Kamekona. The team was seen helping Jerry move out of his house near the beginning of the show, and I didn't mind this scene so much, because Chin Ho gave Jerry serious shit over his illegal bugging of the bookstore. However, at the very end of the show, Jerry was confronted and captured by the store's owner, Thomas Farrow (Greg Ellis). Seriously -- I really don't care where this story arc is going, as mentioned previously!
Despite the episode's minor issues, Alex O'Loughlin did a very good acting job. So did Daniel Dae Kim. Aside from the obnoxious "cute" underscore during the move at Jerry's and the above-mentioned outburst during the exhumation, the music was also very good.
Next week, however, is the annual Hallowe'en exercise which in earlier years has not turned out well. We can hope...
MORE TRIVIA:
- Ellie was a keener in school. The recovered cash box from her father's bar contains a report card of hers where she got "A"s in all of her subjects. Her address at the time was 3964 Mokae Avenue, Honolulu 96816. Her ID was 299492, the school district was 399, and her school, Momi Academy, was number 127.
- In a flashback to Christmas 15 years before when McGarrett's father visits Ellie as his partner Chin Ho waits outside, the HPD squad car is number 467. The current McGarrett is working on the 1974 Mercury Marquis Brougham seen on the original Five-O at the end of the show. The license number is FCS 154, the actual license number of the car.
- When Chin Ho is driving in his classic Mustang, he appears to be actually on an Oahu street, not with the usual projected backgrounds. (Or the projected background technology has improved majorly.)
- cartermatt.com just can't get it right: "Bad news about Jerry – turns out not only is he right about the counter-fitting, but the counter-fitters have found out about him and have taken him."
- The main credits did not kick in until over 8 minutes into the show.
- After McGarrett is seen spiffing himself up for the visit to his father's resting place, he is seen driving in what looks like the countryside. This is followed by shots of the Honolulu freeways and finally the Punchbowl cemetery. The scenery seems to have the color green totally hyped up during the country part of this ride. McGarrett's house is actually The Bayer Estate located between Diamond Head and Hanauma Bay in real life, but in the next show seems to be located on the eastern side of Oahu. (In a season one show, it is identified as being at 2727 Pi'ikoi Street, which is not located on the beach.)
Once again the show started with "Previously on Five-0," taking up about a minute of time, so I guess this is the new norm. This time the flashback was to the story arc of Jerry's investigation of Vintage Books as a front for counterfeiting (or as cartermatt.com said, for the third time, "counter-fitting.").
At the end of last week's show, Jerry was kidnapped by Thomas Farrow, the owner of the bookstore. At the beginning of this show, Farrow is in his house and dressed in a leather apron for some inexplicable reason, maybe to scare the tied-up Jerry into thinking he is going to dismember bodies like someone from a horror movie. Farrow chooses a dumb time to deal with Jerry and Helms (his tall bald associate, identified in the credits of earlier shows as Browser, who is also tied up), since there are tons of kids outside on the streets for Hallowe'en. To scare the crap out of Jerry, Farrow has seemingly beaten up Helms, who he says didn't do his job keeping tabs on Jerry very well, and then seemingly shoots him dead. But, as we learn later, Helms really isn't dead -- it's all a scam. In addition to all his other talents, Farrow must be a special effects guy (using squibs to simulate where the bullet enters Helms' body) and a makeup artist (corn syrup and food coloring for the blood where he has beaten Helms).
When Jerry returns home after he is released by Farrow, he discovers that everything has been removed from his basement by the bookstore owner, and I mean everything: all of Jerry's research, files, his computer and so forth. You have to wonder -- how does Jerry get back into the swing of things investigating for the rest of the show? Near the end of the episode, Jerry is seen with a small computer like a netbook -- is that sufficient? You also have to wonder how Farrow or Helms (or some other "associate") had the time to remove all the junk from the basement and either put it somewhere or destroy it.
In an unusual move, McGarrett tries to get a warrant to search Farrow's place because of Jerry's illegal investigation, calling on his deputy prosecutor pal Ellie Clayton from the previous episode. When she doesn't have any luck because of a lack of recent, and more importantly, reliable information, McGarrett does the usual heavy-handed Five-0 number, arriving at Farrow's place and threatening him. This totally flops, as does any later attempt to find evidence that can be used to arrest him.
It eventually turns out Farrow is not who he seems to be. Instead of a guy who knows a lot about books based on the experience with Kamekona and the rare book, he is actually a British operative named Major William Corrigan. When his true identity is uncovered by Five-0, he is bitter about the fact that he was court martialled (or "court marshalled," as Entertainment Weekly reported) for killing a family of a mother and four children while serving in Iraq about 10 years before. Jerry gets information that Helms, who Five-0 previously determined is very much alive, is Lieutenant Colin Helms, a guy with ties to a "radical IRA splinter group." The counterfeit money is destined for this group because Farrow feels betrayed by his own government.
McGarrett and Danno go after the money when Jerry tells them about "a freighter anchored four miles offshore" (in other words, not in international waters -- 13.8 miles) which is registered in Belfast. The money is not on the freighter right now, though. It is on what looks more like a large tug. There are very vague similarities here to the original show's tenth season show Up the Rebels, where explosives for Ireland were being transported on a large tug all the way from Hawaii to Ireland. But I think most apologists for the new show would suggest that this tug is just going to the freighter. Whatever. Seemingly under the auspices of the Coast Guard, McGarrett and Danno fly to this tug by helicopter and then rappel down to its decks. The bad guys, including Helms, just sit there until the Five-0 duo have both landed on the decks, rather than shoot at them when they are descending. DUH!!
The crime of the week had some potential, but was let down by the usual mediocre writing. Two men have been murdered, one with his tongue removed, the second with his eyes gouged out. The geeky Max recognizes this "plot" as one from a 1984 horror flick called Jack Knife. There is one more victim to come who will lose an ear. Five-0 manages to make a connection between the first two victims -- Henry Chung and Mark Lerner -- with Kamekona's implausible help; he remembers them from school thirty years before as being members of a bullying gang ("equal opportunity haters"). The third member of the gang was Brad Weiss (David DeLuise). After Weiss loses his ear but survives, he tells Five-0 the killer is Sam Cole, who they horribly abused years ago. Cole is suspected for taking revenge on the three bullies, but when Five-0 gets to his house, it turns out that his son Aaron is the killer, inspired by the cult film. Just in case we can't get this connection, Kono finds reference on a Facebook-like social network page on Aaron's computer at his house with a picture of an invitation to a screening of Jack Knife organized by Collector Maniacs memorabilia shop two weeks before. Aaron also attempted to kill his father, who Chin finds tied up outside. Aaron denounces his father as weak and responsible for the fact that he -- Aaron -- was destined never to get anywhere in life.
FAR TOO MUCH TRIVIA:
- There are plenty of questions about the Jerry counterfeiting investigation arc. For example, why did Jerry take an interest in the bookstore and its fishy activities in the first place? As per the first show of the season, the store's owner, Farrow, had bought a bunch of antique books from a library in Europe, and the pages from these books, which had a 75% cotton/25% linen content, could be "melted down" and used to make counterfeit money. But why would Jerry take an interest in this? Even though Jerry is someone obsessed by conspiracies, there is a limit as to how many conspiracies and bad things in the world a person can be interested in. This counterfeiting business hardly seems like a "big deal" in the world of conspiracy freaks. This leads to further questions like where did they melt down the money, how did they convert it to sheets of new paper and print all the currency? At the end of the show, we see the finished product and there is a lot of cash. This would require printing plates, a printing press, ink, and other things like chemicals. You have to wonder why Five-0 couldn't have looked into who was ordering supplies of ink and so forth that could be used to print this money, or where a press could be located that was capable of making so much cash.
- Danno has a few good zingers during the show (as does Grover who acts as the "voice of reason" with regard to Max's stupid Hallowe'en costume, among other things). But Danno's comment that the IRA "died with the last Duran Duran album" is peculiar. First, Duran Duran isn't an Irish band, they are English. They had albums in the 1980s and 1990s and all the way up to 2010. Second, the IRA ended in 1969 according to Wikipedia, then changed to the Provisional IRA (which is what most people would still call "the IRA"). It had a cease fire in 1997 and really ended in 2005.
- The term "serial killer," connected to the crime of the week in the PR for the show, traditionally refers to someone who kills three people, not two, though this is a matter of some dispute among FBI bigshots, who will accept two as sufficient to qualify.
- According to Jerry, Farrow came to Hawaii in 2012, but his driver's license was issued 06/14/2008. The license number is 836H136, Farrow's date of birth is 10/07/82, he is 5'11" and weighs 185 pounds. The license expires on 10/07/2018. His home address is 2210 Purcell Street, Honolulu 96816.
- When the nerdy employee of the memorabilia shop prints out 1,000 e-mail addresses of people who were invited to see Jack Knife at a screening two weeks before Hallowe'en (the exact location of this is not revealed), it takes him only 56 seconds from the time he leaves Kono and Grover until he returns. This employee refers to a Dolby Digital 5.1 laser disc of the film Dune, something which actually exists.
- Why does McGarrett get all moralistic about the fact that when Farrow was in Iraq, he killed members of a family which resulted in Farrow's court-martial? Is this consistent with McGarrett's personality? Terrible things like this happen in war, and there doesn't seem to be any evidence that Farrow targeted these people intentionally, but was responding to what he thought was an imminent attack on him and his men. McGarrett then accuses Farrow of being a "coward" for killing Helms, which we know did not happen, because he is still alive in Hawaii! But McGarrett does not know this yet. This leads to a bitter rant by Farrow, saying "the cowards are the politicians who send us into battle and second-guess every decision we make."
- Weiss gets a call on his cel phone from HPD to warn him that the ear-chopping killer may be visiting him soon, but he neglects to take the call. The voice mail shows HPD's phone number as 808-555-0155. But why would HPD know Weiss's cel phone number?
- Jerry comes up with the quote "As far as extractions go, he's [Farrow's] right up there with Hans and Simon Gruber," two villains from the Die Hard movies.
- Ellie says part of the difficulty in getting a warrant against Farrow is the fact that the bookstore owner had "donated money to half of the judges on the island" and "worked on the governor's campaign" (despite the fact that he was only in Hawaii for two years?).
- Football great Eric Dickerson makes a cameo appearance near the end of the show for no logical reason, other than allowing McGarrett to snap a selfie with him to piss off Danno. This reminded me of the Ed Sullivan show (another CBS product) where Sullivan would get famous people to stand up in the audience and take a bow. McGarrett tells Dickerson that "A.P." came close to breaking his record, meaning Adrian Peterson. The selfie which McGarrett takes has him holding the phone in portrait mode, whereas the resulting picture is in landscape mode.
- When McGarrett and Danno look in a barrel where all the counterfeit money is stored at the end of the show, didn't anyone think that when they opened the barrel, maybe -- SURPRISE! -- Danno's supposedly dead brother would appear? I would have thought that the sight of the barrel would have at least produced some kind of traumatic reaction in Danno.
- Chin Ho's classic Mustang, which I thought his personal car, has police lights on the front.
- Corrigan's service number with the British Special Forces was 171-4321-394.
- Ellie, who is seen fishing with McGarrett at the end of the show, no doubt leading to speculation about romance between the two, tells him her father used to take her to their native Australia for their holidays, specifically Port Phillip Bay, where she learned her fishing skills.
- Whereas the previous show's photography had several very green moments, this show seemed to emphasize the color blue more.
- When Five-0 stops Farrow from leaving the country with his store all boxed up for shipment on a cargo plane, they once again uncover no connection to the funny money. Farrow protests he is being harassed, but McGarrett says they are holding him for failure to fill out "Form 7501," which authorizes the exportation of commercial goods. This is a Homeland Security document, but it is for the importation of commercial goods.
- Someone being motivated to kill by what's happening in a video has vague similarities to the original show's sixth season episode Draw Me A Killer where a deranged individual murders several people because of his reactions to a comic strip in the daily paper.
This episode was hyped big time, because it was number one hundred. There was even a special song written for the finale of the show entitled "All For One" by John Ondrasik of Five For Fighting. I managed to avoid most of this publicity, as I have been trying to do for all the episodes this year so far.
The show had "vague similarities" to an episode of the classic series, the two-hour season nine premiere Nine Dragons, where Wo Fat kidnapped McGarrett in Hong Kong and held him prisoner, applying "behavior modification through stress" to turn McGarrett into a near-robot denouncing his country. There are further references to Wo to Woe Fat, the original series' finale, where Wo exposes prisoners to "compliance ration," some kind of gas which overcomes their "will to resist." In the current episode, Wo Fat kidnaps McGarrett and holds him captive in the basement of a dry cleaning plant which he had purchased several years ago. Wo tortures McGarrett to reveal the location of his father, who Doris, Steve's CIA spy momma, had tried to assassinate. With the help of a black female assistant Eris (Tracy Ifeachor), Wo subjects McGarrett to "behavioral engineering," including water boarding, taser-like electrical stimulation and injection of various chemicals including truth serum. The torture the new McGarrett is subjected to was very nasty twenty-first century torture.
The show began with a "previously on Five-0" of sorts, with a flashback to the beginning of the pilot episode, except McGarrett's father did not die. Instead, he was rescued by HPD led by Danny Williams. This deviation from the original script and much of what followed was obviously hallucinations McGarrett was experiencing thanks to Wo Fat's drugs. Most of it was pretty funny: Danno driving his own car, loving Hawaii and his wife, wearing an aloha shirt and using McGarrett-like interrogation techniques; Kamekona a big time convict; Chin Ho on his way to becoming chief of HPD; Grover a tourist annoyed that his golf clubs had been stolen; and Kono a champion surfer and model doing commercials for lip balm. Other people in the show who had appeared in the past included Jenna Kaye and Victor Hesse. Duke Lukela was still Duke Lukela. Jerry appeared as a babbling homeless conspiracy freak.
Sang Min also appeared once again, this time to help Five-0 take down Johnny Moreau (Gavin Rossdale), who had taken over Sang's business enterprises, including drug trafficking, prostitution and kidnapping. Sang also provided information about who could have helped Wo Fat kidnap McGarrett. This was conveniently confirmed by Adam Noshimuri, whose family had connections to the sale of the dry cleaning plant to Wo, using the alias of Anthony Shu.
Despite the major unpleasantness of the torture scenes, Alex O'Loughlin did an exceptional acting job throughout, and Scott Caan's character's reversal showed that he can play something other than his usual one-note persona.
The big reveal in this episode was that Wo Fat had been raised by Doris McGarrett after she killed Wo's mother during her assassination attempt on Wo's father years before. She continued to do this until her superiors at the CIA forced her to abandon the kid. However, all this produces some serious questions: McGarrett was born 3/10/1977 (as per a screen shot in the season one finale), so when did his mother have time to raise his "step-brother"? McGarrett's father's birth date was March 15, 1942. So Steve was born when his father was 34 years old. His mother died on April 19, 1992 when he was 15.
There was not one, but two fight sequences in the show, perhaps the most intense fights seen on the show yet. The first was McGarrett against Eris, the second McGarrett against Wo Fat. The previously mentioned song at the end accompanied a montage of "greatest scenes from the show so far." The sound mix for this episode was exceptionally good, as were the production values, though there were still a few lines which were difficult to understand. Most of the musical score was the typical noise, though there were a few nice sequences reminiscent of Lost (as were several of the scenes during McGarrett's torture).
MORE TRIVIA:
- When Five-0 arrived on the scene where McGarrett had been abducted, the Mercury Marquis Brougham owned by O'Loughlin's McGarrett (and driven by Jack Lord on the original series) was showing serious damage to the driver's side window. The car was also really dirty and dusty outside which makes me think this is not the original car, despite it having the same license plate.
- When Five-0 brought Sang Min to Moreau's place, why didn't Moreau bother to check outside to see if there was some kind of setup? Sang's disappearance after he gave Moreau an envelope full of blank paper in the form of dollar bills was far too quick, as was the appearance of Kono and Chin Ho inside the building. Similarly, why didn't Wo Fat, who left the subterranean torture room, hear all the noise during the fight with Eris?
- The film showing McGarrett and his sister as kids at the beginning of the film, probably made in the late 1980s, had sound. But according to Wikipedia, "few [8mm] cameras were made that could record the sound directly onto the film."
- Sang Min refers to Kono as "Spicy"; Danno calls Hesse "Bono."
- Questions about Wo's escape from the Colorado Supermax prison in the last episode of last season remained unanswered. The scar on Wo's face seemed less serious than previously; perhaps he had been visiting the Honolulu Dermabrasion Clinic.
- Incredulously, some fan sites had people thinking that this was the last episode of the series or that it had been cancelled!
After a couple of above-average episodes, this show brought the reboot crashing down to its usual bad reality TV level.
McGarrett's Aunt Deb (Carol Burnett) returned, still cancer-stricken but now undergoing chemotherapy, which presumably accounted for the ghastly makeup the actress had when we first saw her. She's come to Hawaii to get married to Leonard Cassano (Frank Valli of The Four Seasons), a guy with near-perfect teeth who she met in a cancer support group. He has stage four leukemia.
Cassano is a mob lawyer who may have tampered with evidence to get one of his clients off. Jerry, a.k.a. "Mr. Conspiracy," is assigned to investigate this, as if the Supercomputer is broken. When McGarrett, thinking of his aunt, confronts Cassano, her husband-to-be gives McGarrett an unopened package containing this evidence -- which Cassano has brought with him, expecting problems with McGarrett. McGarrett, again thinking of his aunt, decides rather than turning this over to the the district attorney in Cassano's jurisdiction of New York, he instead will put this package on ice, anticipating that Leonard will soon kick the bucket.
Aunt Deb seems to have been brought back to the show to give her nephew an opportunity to reflect on his life. She tells him that although she was a flop as far as her singing career and having children was concerned, she has finally found love with Leonard. McGarrett flashes back to Catherine in Afghanistan, who seems now to have been gone a really long time, coming to grips with the fact that she is really, really not coming back. He tells Deb that Catherine found her friend's kid but now wants to stay and protect him and the other kids in the village from the Taliban (really). McGarrett says "She's found her place."
The crime of the week had the usual crazy plot machinations.
At the beginning of the show, David Kealoha, an investment banker and financial advisor who was under investigation by the SEC for inappropriate use of his clients' funds, is found brutally shotgunned to death along with his wife Kate.
The major suspects are his two sons Jake (Nathan Kress) and Travis (Charlie Carver), aged 17 and 21 respectively, and Kealoha's sleazy lawyer Eugene Goodman (John Billingsley). Travis becomes very suspicious when he flees from a polygraph examination and is trailed in a really obvious way reminiscent of the old Five-O by Chin and Kono to a motel where he meets with Patti Gable (Josie Davis), the MILFish mother of his best friend Tai who, up to this point, has been Travis's alibi for the time period when his parents were killed. Patti, described by McGarrett as a "hot mess" and Grover as "Mrs. Robinson," isn't a murderer and neither is Travis, however -- they were just "doing it" and were thinking of fessing up to Travis's parents soon.
Back to the Five-0 office where the Supercomputer can finally figure out that Goodman had power of attorney over his clients' funds and an old bank account of Kate Kealoha shows that $100,000 was paid to Greg Barber, a known hit man, to knock off the two parents.
But the computer doesn't seem to show exactly who paid out this money, because it later turns out it was not Goodman, but Kate. At Barber's place, after he is knocked off, Grover suddenly finds a laptop which has e-mails from Kate to Barber with pictures of their house. Grover can figure this all out in a matter of seconds. How Kate knew about or contacted the hitman is a big mystery, especially since he was an "old client of Goodman" and seemingly had no connection to her at all. The bottom line, according to Five-0, is: Kate arranged to have Barber kill both her and her husband so the boys could collect a $20 million double indemnity life insurance policy. I am not making this up! Talk about stupid writing!
(This is not as stupid as the revelation during the big final scene about how Five-0 did a blood test on the Kealoha's dog Riley to determine that it was out of commission while the murder was going on, having been doped up by some of Kate's sleeping pills.)
Considering there was no reason for Kate to have both herself and her husband killed, inasmuch as the insurance policy was just on David, a more plausible explanation, which the writer did not consider, would be she hired the hitman to just kill David, but when Barber found the two of them together, he decided to knock her off as well because she was a witness who could finger him for the crime.
But, overriding this logical explanation, this still leaves the question: Why would she, in effect, use the hitman to commit suicide? According to Patti, Kate did try to commit suicide previously when she found out about her husband's financial dealings, but there is a big difference between swallowing some pills and having someone blast you with a shotgun.
Bad, bad, bad!!
MORE TRIVIA:
- In addition to the usual "twittering" about Catherine on fan forums after her appearance in this show's flashback, and not exclusively by people who have no idea who she is, the following incredible comment was posted on IMDb: "At the wedding as his aunt and husband were saying their vows, there was a close up on Steve and he was crying..or at least looked very sad. It's been awhile since I saw his character that way. I'm kinda hoping it's the first sign of his PTSD that I heard rumoured on the way. Or it could be also that he's happy for his aunt? He'd be more smiling than crying though,no? Or really missing Catherine and the wedding is reminding him of a love, lost? What do you think? I'm hoping it's the PTSD starting." A reality show, indeed.
- There is a major goof: The two sons' drivers licenses were issued on the days they were born: 08/05/94 and 03/10/97. The license number of Travis, the older brother, is 492H202. He is 5'11", weighs 175 lb and has brown eyes and hair. His license expires 08/05/16. Jake's driver's license is number 343T849. He is 5'10", weighs 165 lb and also has brown hair and eyes. It expires 3/10/19. Their home address is 705 Alinalina Place, Honolulu 96825. (There seems to be more than 1" difference in the height of the two boys in the show.)
- When the dog runs in front of the car at the beginning of the show, it looks very phony, since it is likely a front-projected backdrop.
- The Kealoha boys' doper friend Tai Gable is played by Wilke Itzin, son of Gregory Itzin, who played President Logan on season four of "24," a show that Five-0 executive producer Peter Lenkov also executive produced. Gregory Itzen appears in episode 12, coming up shortly.
- Hitman Barber, played by an uncredited actor, lives on Oahu, and is tracked down by Five-0 who engage in the usual firefight. But after McGarrett drops through the skylight in Barber's apartment, he has no choice but to shoot him, thus again eliminating a prime suspect, at least for a few minutes.
- The sound mix for this show was terrible in a few spots, and not because the dialogue was overpowered by the music, as is the usual complaint.
- When Chin and Kono are tailing Travis to the motel, they are actually photographed in a car driving down a Honolulu street. Amazing!
- There is an interesting stunt when McGarrett runs across the top of several parked food trucks when he, Grover and Chin are pursuing Tai.
- David Kealoha worked for a company called Bordinay Investments.
- McGarrett uses the term "son of a bitch" when referring to Leonard after Jerry brings him up to date on Cassano's past.
The thing I liked the most about this show was the change of scenery to the Big Island.
It began on the slopes of Mauna Loa where a Mars Rover-like device was cruising around the mountain while a guy in an astronaut suit tended to it in the midst of the barren Mars-like landscape. (This is connected to a real research project.) A cowboy, Keone Maka (Christopher Huffine) suddenly showed up and dropped dead, beginning the crime of the week.
With complications including cowboys, horses and a rodeo, much of the crime of the week was interesting, more so to me than the original show's low-key ninth-season rodeo episode Requiem for a Saddle Bronc Rider.
Investigating Maka's death, Five-0 talk to Al Mokuau (Ron Yuan), boss of the local rodeo, who suggests that Maka had trouble with Luke Pakele (Cody Easterbrook), a bull rider who was doping animals with steroids. They track down Pakele, who lives in the bizarre Kalapana Gardens where houses are constructed on a lava flow field. He is the red herring suspect who says that he was "pissed" at getting fired from the rodeo, but did not kill Maka. Maka's place has been trashed, and a vial of what turns out to be horse blood is found in a milk carton in the refrigerator. Maka made numerous phone calls to Jeff Harrison (Frank Ashmore), a trainer connected with Urban Myth, a Kentucky Derby horse which mysteriously disappeared on the mainland some time ago. Chin determines that Harrison is on the island, but when Danno and Kono arrive at his motel, Harrison collapses, foaming at the mouth. At the motel, Max and local medical examiner Sanjeet Dhawan (Ravi Patel) find a bottle which contains traces of liquid nicotine. The blood sample from Maka's fridge is also analyzed and determined to belong to Urban Myth. Five-0 figures that after the horse was stolen, it was taken to a stud farm on the island, and one of the 3 stud farms there happens to belong to Mokuau, the rodeo boss. Through Mokuau's financials, McGarrett discovers that a backhoe is to be delivered to a property Mokuau owns near Waimea, suggesting that he intends to kill the race horse and bury it. Quickly arriving at this location, Mokuau is put out of action and the case is closed.
For this episode, McGarrett stayed in Honolulu for meetings with the Governor and was on screen just a bit less than 20% of the time. Jerry was nowhere to be seen (yay!). Max, Danno and Grover flew to the Big Island, with Kono showing up soon after. Chin Ho held down the fort in the Five-0 offices.
On the negative side, the show was far too Max-centric. The show's resident geek became overly conflicted mere seconds after he stepped off the helicopter because of his previous relationship with Dhawan, who he had encountered at medical school. At one point, Max raised his voice louder than I ever recall hearing on the show, including the expression "son of a bitch" directed at Dhawan. All the fuss turned out to be over "a woman," specifically some Star Trek action figure of Yeoman Janice Rand the two had fought over years before. Seriously, there were times in this show when I felt like punching Max in the face.
Also on the annoying side was the cleverness and speed with which certain elements of the crime of the week were figured out, like how the blood from the refrigerator was tied in to the missing race horse and how the poison was determined to be liquid nicotine, a component of e-cigarettes -- not to mention the speed with which Five-0 got to Urban Myth's execution location.
And then there were issues with the kidnapped horse. How could Mokuau provide stud services with Urban Myth? Surely he would have to tell people the horse's name and background if he were to demand high fees! The fact that, as he said, "no one cared" about the horse and the fact that its owners had likely received an insurance payout didn't negate the fact that it was stolen.
The show's sub-plot had McGarrett cutting down a Christmas tree in a protected forest on Oahu because it was too expensive for Danno to buy one. This was dumb, aside from giving the two an excuse to bicker about something. But so was the related sub-plot of Officer Pua Kai (Shawn Thomsen) investigating this "crime." It seemed odd that the show's resident comic-relief cop would be the one chosen out of HPD's 2,000-plus officers to deal with this, especially considering his previous relationship with members of Five-0.
I'm sure McGarrett and Danno could get a smart lawyer to easily overturn the resulting $1200 citation, because Pua's "photo lineup" was highly prejudiced against the two of them. All of the guys in the lineup except McGarrett and Danno were tough-looking Hawaiian dudes. The woman who picked them out didn't have to work too hard, describing them as "two haoles."
More likely, though, they will use the usual "immunity and means" nonsense, but on what grounds? Maybe McGarrett could plead temporary insanity, saying "I had to cut the tree down because that freaking Danno was driving me crazy."
I thought it pretty funny at the end when Kamekona was leading the singing of "Silent Night" they cut the song similar to the way the Five-O theme is chopped during the show's end credits. To make up for this, there was an expansive arrangement of the Five-O theme near the beginning when Max, Grover and Danno arrived at the crime scene by helicopter.
MORE TRIVIA:
- Though the name of the astronaut at the beginning of the episode was not mentioned, his name in the end credits, Richard Royce, was the same as the character in the original show's 10th season episode Shake Hands With The Man On The Moon, about a washed-up astronaut involved with a sleazy real estate developer.
- Dhawan's license plate on his Volkswagen "Thing" (same car as Max was seen driving in the season two premiere episode) was SET4STN, i.e., "set for stun."
- Harrison's Los Angeles phone number is 323-555-0155. He used his credit card numbered
6159 4202 0073 2189 to buy a ticket to Honolulu on Palm West Airlines. The ticket cost $426.00. The "Awww" reconciliation between Harrison and his horse near the end of the show was strictly out of movies like My Friend Flicka and probably very appealing to the Facebook cat video crowd.- Danno got to drive in this episode, and very, very fast, as they transported the poisoned Harrison to the hospital.
- When Five-0 arrives at Mokuau's Nakata Ranch, why do they have the sirens blaring? Surely there is no easier way to get a suspect to run (though Mokuau was not there).
- Danno's house number is 905.
- Watch at the very end of the show for Santa and his sleigh crossing the moon.
This episode was interesting, primarily because of guest star William Forsythe as ex-HPD cop, former friend of McGarrett’s father and now private investigator Harry Brown. As well, the music approached above average because the resident composers tried some new ideas in addition to the usual stock effects like the pizzicato string-like plink-plunk near the beginning in the scene with Jerry and brainiac kid Ani (Youngaisa Wily, son of Kamekona). Hopefully these new musical ideas will not become new clichés! The production values like the photography were well above average throughout.
Forsythe did a great job playing the world-weary detective from Lāna‘i looking for Brooke Waiakea (Delys Kanemura Recca), the daughter of a friend. She had come to Oahu and joined the Manoa Hula Company, a front for an escort agency, and was found murdered after witnessing the killing of one of her clients. Featuring the point-of-view of Brown through a film noir style narration was "something completely different" for the show and it worked well, though it did call attention to itself, as did the opening sequence which was in reverse. Calling attention to itself is not necessarily a bad thing, though you have to wonder why the show waited until its fifth season to get more creative in this fashion.
Unfortunately, the plot of the crime of the week was a veritable fish market with red herrings falling all over each other. By the end of the show, when the "bad guy" was revealed to be Kiana Thompson (Andrea Roth), the boss of the escort agency, I had pretty well lost interest. But then I watched the show again and realized that plot logic once again collapsed near the end. (Bear with me, this is complicated.)
An early suspect in Brooke’s murder was David Waring (Trevor Kuhn), a loser who was involved with multiple lawsuits over failed real estate deals, who was himself murdered as per the above. Waring was engaged to Erica Young (Grace Phipps), whose father, Robert (Doug Savant), was also a client of the escort agency, even though he said he only hired the dancers for a corporate event. Somehow Young found out about Waring’s connection to the agency’s girls. But how did this happen? Did Thompson tell him, maybe because Waring was in the news regarding his engagement to Erica? What was in this for Thompson?
After Brooke witnessed Young murdering Waring, who was pissed that his daughter would marry such a “scumbag,” Brooke took a cab to her house and then called Thompson, who phoned Young to tell him that Brooke had seen what happened (she was hiding in the bathroom at Waring’s place). After Thompson told Young where Brooke was, he went to Brooke's house and killed her, then disposed of her body with his friend Richard Sheridan (Eric Roberts, in a near-cameo role) who “owed him a favor.” Why would Thompson have called Young to tell him all this?
Danno makes some remark that Brooke was "not worth losing two clients over in one night." But she had already "lost" one client -- Waring, who was dead!
There were sub-plots with the Kono/Adam relationship (very brief) and Jerry trying to get a job with the I.T. company Inotech. Both of these were stupid and just took time from the quality aspects of the show. At least there was no "ohana" finale -- a definite plus!
In another useless sequence, McGarrett was seen sparring in a boxing ring with Ellie, his prosecutor friend from episodes five and six. This led to speculation on some fan forums about the usual “where is this relationship going,” though if people listened carefully, they would have heard that Ellie was trying to set McGarrett up on a date with her yet-unseen friend Jess who is “drop-dead gorgeous,” supports the Second Amendment and her favorite movie is The Guns of Navarone, a 1961 war film starring Gregory Peck. McGarrett’s response to Ellie's matchmaking was “I’m just taking my time.”
Speaking of romance, there was a nice scene between Danno and assistant medical examiner Mindy Shaw. She was freaked out by Brooke’s murder, which brought back bad memories from her college years of a friend who disappeared. Whether this is going to lead anywhere is a good question.
MORE TRIVIA:
- The song heard at the end during the flashback of Brooke surfing was Possibility Days by Counting Crows.
- Waring’s drivers license, number 772A043, shows his address as 4399 Dawes Road, Honolulu 96816. His date of birth (also date the license was issued) was 07/18/80. He was 6’1”, weighed 175 pounds and had brown hair and eyes. His license expires on 07/18/20.
- The stereo mix was particularly bad in parts of the show like the dialogue in the scene between Jerry and Ani … but crystal clear when I managed to get a copy of the show which had Dolby Digital sound. Turning on the closed-captions is strongly recommended if you can’t understand … though this particular show’s problem was not the usual complaint about how the music is drowning out the talking. In some of the scene where Chin and Kono were grilling Brooke's roommate Annie Reese (Carlie Casey) there was NO MUSIC AT ALL (very effective).
- In an unusual move for this show, Richard Sheridan demanded to talk to his lawyer when in the blue-lit room.
- According to Michael Timothy, Harry Brown’s car is a 1965 Ford Thunderbird hardtop.
- There were plenty of bad words in this show: “He was really pissed”; “You don’t want to piss this guy off”; “Get the hell out of here”; “Son of a bitch”; “This crazy bastard assaulted me”; “Give me five minutes with this son of a bitch.”
- The opening shot of this episode is similar to the opening shot of the pilot episode of the original series (thanks to Jason from Dallas for pointing this out).
This episode was bland, with far too much cutesy-poo stuff, especially Kamekona getting involved in some Shrimpapalooza cook-off, being tutored Karate Kid-style by Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto and going up against Sam Choy (both real Hawaiian restaurateurs). Maybe this comic relief was to make up for the absence of Danno, who was nowhere to be seen. Jerry did appear, helping out Five-0 in the Takahamo Cleaning & Restoration truck, including running it into the bad guys at the end to stop them from escaping.
The crime of the week involved Lukas Janssen (Henri Lubatti), an art thief from Belgium, smuggling a stolen Van Gogh into Hawaii and, to avoid getting arrested, hiding the painting in the carry-on suitcase of Bryan Wallace (Gerald Downey), a father travelling to the islands with his family. After Wallace arrived and was settled in his hotel room and the rest of his family went down to the pool, he was shot by Janssen, who took back the painting. Janssen then used it as an entry ticket to meet local art collector Tom Emery (Casper Andreas) who offered similar valuable stolen paintings for sale to a select few in a back room of his Oahu mansion.
As usual there was something stupid in the script -- in this case, the fact the Janssen put the Van Gogh into the carry-on suitcase. Maybe someone would like to explain to me how he did this. Was the case beside the family in the pre-boarding area of the departure terminal or was it in the luggage space above the seats on the plane, where Janssen was sitting right next to them? In either case (no pun intended), wouldn't have someone SEEN Janssen open the suitcase (assuming it was not locked) and put the painting inside? Geez...
Acting undercover, Chin and Kono infiltrated a get-together at Emery's place with the help of geeky dealer Gerard Hirsch (Willie Garson), who was attending an art collectors' meeting and auction in Honolulu. (Kono, wearing slinky dresses, was -- as expected -- the "bait" to attract him.) Unfortunately, their cover was blown by Janssen and his technologically sophisticated associates, who took everyone at Emery's hostage and then attempted to escape with the paintings from the inner room, resulting in a ridiculous shootout outside the mansion which put the fleeing guests in great danger.
The other major guest star was English actress and Lost alumni Rebecca Mader playing Nicole Booth, an investigator for Bishop & Copley Insurance who was trying to track down the Van Gogh, supposedly worth $55 million (the painting seen in the show was based on one in real life).
Once again, out of all the cops at HPD, Officer Pua Kai (Shawn Thomsen) had some connection with Five-0. This was surprising, considering his antics two episodes earlier with the ticket he gave McGarrett and Danno for cutting down the Christmas tree. In light of this, I was surprised that Kono didn't have anything to say about working with him, but maybe this was counterbalanced by his confession that he was no longer interested in her and had found another girl friend (note to show producers: please spare us from encountering this woman in a future episode!). Pua appeared in the hotel's security room, trying to figure out via surveillance camera footage who attempted to kill Wallace, drawing on his former experience in S03E17 as a security guard at the Marriott Hotel. At Kono's direction, he managed to pull up a closeup of a tag on Wallace's suitcase that Janssen was taking out of the hotel. Do security cameras usually have such magnification?
The photography had plenty of tourist shots, plus quite a few closeups of McGarrett. The music was back to its usual nonsense, including far too much of the string pizzicato-like accompaniment.
MORE TRIVIA:
- Tom Emery's place was located at 1055 Olohua Road, Honolulu 96816. His driver's license, number 938H311, showed his date of birth as 08/22/1974 and was isued on 08/22/1998 with a 20-year span (according to various WWW sites I checked, the longest you can get a license for in Hawaii is 8 years). Emery was 5'11" and weighed 175 pounds.
- Janssen's Belgian passport number P3013GL showed his birthday to be 12.05.73. The passport was issued on 05.12.10.
- When Booth said she could get the schematics for Emery's high-tech house, she did so VERY quickly.
- Near the end of the show, when Janssen and his associates, using some radio frequency detector, figured out that Chin Ho was wearing glasses which not only contained a camera but a microphone, why didn't Jerry, who was monitoring the video and audio from these, just turn them off?
This show, which dealt with "family" from several angles, began with Grover comforting his daughter who was freaking out over her kidnapping and confinement by Ian Wright last season. This, plus the following heart-to-heart between Grover and Chin Ho plus scenes with Grover and his daughter at the end of the show, made me wonder -- is there going to be some further development of this in a future episode?
Then we cut to another family scene at the household of Dr. Christine DuPont (Sarah Jane Morris), chief neurosurgeon at the Kuakini Medical Centre. Her kids are being a pain and her husband Mark (Brian Letscher) has to deal with them. She has been called to the hospital on her day off to perform an emergency operation.
Next we see Alex Mackey (Gregory Itzin), a kindly grandfather type, getting his grandson off to school on a Roberts Hawaii School Bus. He tells the kid that they will go to J.J. Dolan's for pizza later (a real Honolulu restaurant located in Chinatown). We see Dr. DuPont arrive at her job, where Mackey suddenly appears in the parking lot, pulls out a gun and shoots her dead in her car.
After the main titles, McGarrett is seen jogging with Danno's daughter Gracie in preparation for a competition when the two of them see his 1974 Mercury Marquis Brougham which has been stolen. McGarrett leaves Gracie and pursues the car, knowing exactly which fence and hedge to leap over in the neighborhood so he can unsuccessfully try to catch the car on the next street.
When he arrives at the hospital crime scene, Danno gives McGarrett a hard time about abandoning Gracie. McGarrett replies that at least "I didn't leave her in the middle of Makaha," suggesting not that this is a bad place, but one in the middle of nowhere (see the map of Oahu).
Five-O thinks that DuPont's murder has something to do with an operation she was going to perform on Paul Delano (William Baldwin), temporarily out of Halawa because he has been diagnosed with a possible aneurism. Chin Ho and McGarrett pay Delano a bedside visit in the hospital where he taunts Chin with the fact that his brother Frank killed Chin's wife Malia ("How's what's left of the family?"), among other things.
This part of the plot had very vague similarities to S03E01 of the original series where a young girl was kidnapped by Wo Fat to prevent her surgeon father from performing an operation to save the life of a government agent whose assassination under Wo's direction was bungled. But the business with Delano is a red herring, since there is no reason why someone would have knocked off the doctor to get rid of him because, while he has been shooting his mouth off in Halawa recently, he is not trying to pull off some big takeover in the prison, by his own admission.
Having eliminated Delano as having anything to do with the doctor's murder, Kono finds some recordings on DuPont's work desktop computer she had made with another patient who recently died -- Mana Tahni (Rodney Oshiro), a low-level criminal loser who has been in prison for 40 of his 55 years. Tahni was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer and gave the doctor an astounding confession before he died, but according to Max, he didn't die from cancer, but from having been smothered in his hospital bed with a pillow.
Tahni told her that years before at the Wilea Reform School where he was incarcerated he witnessed four boys -- friends of his -- being taken to solitary confinement in a swelteringly hot basement. These boys, who had escaped from the place in June 1974 with Tahni and had stolen the car from one of the guards before they were recaptured, were never seen again and Tahni suspected that they had all died as a result of their punishment. The doctor had apparently been snooping around on the Internet later trying to find information about this case, though you have to wonder why she didn't just turn the whole matter over to the cops.
Along with information about the four boys, DuPont also got the name of the warden of the school, Walter Russell (Wings Hauser), who was forced to resign in 1975 over "official misconduct," including abuse of boys at the school. When Grover, Danno and McGarrett visit Russell, he turns out to be a Vietnam vet and Class A nut job whose place in the middle of nowhere is booby-trapped with punji sticks that are straight out of the movie The Green Berets. After Russell tries to escape and is killed by one of his creations, Grover deduces that he was seriously "off his meds." Once again, Five-0 loses a suspect during their "pursuit of justice."
Kono makes a further connection between Russell, the reform school and the bad guard (nicknamed "Huhu," or "Angry") who turns out to be Mackey from the beginning of the show. After the reform school closed down, he got a job as a maintenance man for 36 years at DuPont's hospital, and Five-0 suggests he knew the ins and outs of the system there and managed to keep his face off the security cameras when he was shooting the doctor.
But this is just sloppy writing, because Mackey retired from the place in 2011 (at least 3 years before), so why would no one recognize him (or not) if he was around the place? As well, it is said that he "had access to Dr. DuPont's schedule," which makes no sense, because she was called in to do the operation on the morning she was killed, at which time Mackey was seeing his grandson off on the school bus ... not the night before when Mackey was supposedly killing Tahni with the pillow in the hospital. And why would Mackey even know about Tahni? Would the doctor have mentioned his name to Russell? Even if she had been scheduled the night before, would Mackey have had access to any of this information regarding her schedule? At least we can guess that Mackey was tipped off about the doctor's investigation by Russell, who the doctor had phoned, according to her phone records.
Brought to the blue-lit room, Mackey essentially tells McGarrett and Danno that they have nothing on him, which is probably correct, because the only thing they do have is Tahni's confession recorded on DuPont's phone, which is probably inadmissable in court. But after the four boys' bodies are discovered outside the school, McGarrett says that they have finally got evidence to convict ... but what is this? Fingerprints on the shackles put on the boys? DNA of some kind? They don't say, but Mackey blabs away in the best Five-Zero tradition, completely implicating himself!
Back at the Five-O office, McGarrett gets to play social worker with Nahele Huikala (Kekoa Kekumano), the kid who stole his car, who has been living on the streets, and whose family is a mess. Rather than have the kid busted, McGarrett gives Pua Kai, who makes yet another appearance, some money to get the kid dressed and fed. Later Nahele gets a job at Kamekona's Shrimp Shack, serving the Five-O ohana who guzzle beers on the beach as the usual banal plink-plunk music plays in the background.
This episode should really get only two stars because of its excessive family focus and script stupidities, but I give it a half star more for its exceptionally good villains: Daniel Baldwin, Gregory Itzin, who gave "bad presidents" a bad name with his portrayal of Charles Logan on "24," and Wings Hauser.
MORE TRIVIA:
- The four boys who died at the reform school were Tai Saluni, Poto Kanoa, Fata Lotomau and Jason Inoke.
- Mackey's driver's license number 6H83244M shows that he lives at 3412 Nalunalu Street, Wai'anae 96792. His birthdate is 06/10/1952 (Itzin's actual birthdate is 04/20/1948), the license was issued 04/18/2008 and expires 06/10/2022. He is 5'11" (actually 5'9"), weighs 195 lb. and has blue eyes.
- Russell's prescription of the antipsychotic drug chlorpromazine from Dr. William Matushira was filled on 10/29/14.
- Bad words: "son of a bitch" (twice from McGarrett over the theft of his car, once by Danno to Mackey); "You bet your ass I do!" (Delano to Chin Ho)
- Danno refers to McGarrett's stolen car as a "death trap on wheels" and a "classic piece of junk," phrases not likely to endear Danno to fans of the original show. Later when the car is found, it is on blocks with the wheels missing. It looks depressing, aside from the fact that it is filthy dirty. Pua Kai and Duke are part of the team investigating the car's disappearance. Later when Danno is calling the car "a piece of junk car of yours," McGarrett has a good line: "Don't trivialize my suffering."
- Max plays some of "The Merry Widow" which he says is from Dimitri Tiomkin's score to the Hitchcock film Shadow of a Doubt on the piano in his office. But the Merry Widow Waltz heard in this film is not by Tiomkin at all, but by Franz Lehar.
- The punji sticks at Russell's place are obviously made of rubber rather than bamboo.
- If Delano is going to have surgery on his head, why isn't it shaved?
- Fred Helfing points out that around 3:45 in the show on the DVDs, Alex Mackey is seen walking his grandson to the school bus stop. The episode clearly shows a street sign as the 900 block 14th Avenue and though they blur out the cross street, it's easy to find (Kaimuki Avenue). There is an apartment building in the background, and in front of the building is a scaffold structure for painting or construction. Looking at this location with Google Maps reveals this scaffolding, but the episode aired in January 2015 and the Google Maps shot is from August 2011, suggesting that the scaffolding was still there 3-1/3 years later!
I liked this show, despite the fact that, if you think hard about it, much of it was pretty stupid. It was a total turn-off-your-brain, kick-ass episode, something we haven't seen for quite a while. In fact, I think this was the most kick-ass of any episode I've yet seen on Five-Zero, though my memory for past shows is not what it could be. The crime of the week took up the entire 44 minutes and there was a minimal amount of the usual "ohana" drivel.
The beginning of the show had a "holy fucking shit" moment. Joe White, now running a private security business, comes back to Hawaii accompanying Mitch Lange, a serviceman who has contracted H5N4, a deadly form of bird flu. Why Lange is isn't being taken to the mainland is a mystery, especially since it's later revealed there is no level 4 biosafety lab on Oahu where he could be treated.
McGarrett grudgingly meets Joe, expecting no doubt to be jerked around yet more by his former mentor with regards to issues concerning his mother. But Joe says that he is "not gonna duck [questions] anymore ... You want answers -- I'm here to give you answers." McGarrett is skeptical, describing his mother as "self-serving."
As they are on their way to Tripler Medical Center to give Lange a shot of serum which will cure his ails, complete with a hazmat team and a police escort, a giant wrecking ball hits McGarrett's car and several terrorist types appear out of nowhere and kidnap Lange. Both Joe and McGarrett seem to be seriously injured, but McGarrett hops on the motorcycle of some cop who got knocked off during the attack and follows the kidnappers' truck. Once he finds it, it is empty.
At the Five-0 offices, Nalani Dyer, the Honolulu Center for Disease Control station director, played in a rather matter-of-fact way by Clare Nono, gives the team the dope on Lange's malady, which has a very high mortality rate of 85% (actually 93.9% according to the stats Dyer rattles off, 1315 of 1400 infected people in the Philippines where the virus originated). Later, Dr. Jill Loi (Elaine Kao) at the University of Oahu tells Danno and Kono that if the virus reaches the general population, it will not only decimate everyone in Hawaii, but everyone in the entire world!
Five-0 later determines that Dr. Howard Rennick, head of virology at Oahu State University is somehow involved with the attack. When they arrive at Rennick's home, they have a firefight with terrorists, and they find Rennick's wife tied up in a closet. She tells them six men kidnapped her husband three days ago.
Despite the fact that Dyer said it would be difficult to set up a level 4 lab, the bad guys got Rennick to order $30,000 worth of laboratory equipment with his credit card and all these supplies were delivered to Oahu and set up on some farm in the middle of nowhere (Hau'ula) ... within the last three days!
Not only that, Michael Carson (Mikal Vega), the guy in charge of this operation, a former CIA agent who went rogue years before and recruited various mercenary types from Yugoslavia, Albania and Russia to help him, is able to test the virus, which will be distributed with bees who have powder extracted from Lange's infected blood on their wings using a process called lyophilization (freeze-drying).
Everyone suddenly becomes very clever. McGarrett realizes that charred burlap and pine needles found in the nostrils of one of the terrorists he shot dead during the initial attack is something associated with a "bee smoker," a device used in beekeeping to calm honey bees. Chin Ho cross-checks spikes in power (a level 4 lab needs a lot of electricity) with addresses where bees have been purchased or sold recently.
Five-0 arrives at the farm in the middle of nowhere and has yet another shoot-out with the rest of the terrorists, but a "Waimea Honey Company" truck full of bees manages to head to downtown Honolulu to do damage. Joe White manages to get on the truck and is involved in various mind-bending stunts, including driving the truck off a dock in a manner highly reminiscent of the show Hookman in order to neutralize the virus-laden insects.
The show ends with McGarrett and Joe sort of friendly, but McGarrett is still suspicious that Joe is hiding something. I am predicting in my Nostradamus manner the dreaded double-M (McGarrett's mom) will be appearing soon, or at least her story thread will come to an end.
MORE TRIVIA:
- Hau'ula, the location of the farm, really is "in the middle of nowhere." According to Google maps, it would take over an hour to get to Honolulu if you wanted to drive a truck off a dock there.
- I'm sure the shots of the huge cargo plane landing at the beginning of the show, containing Lange and the hazmat team, have been seen before in some other episode.
- Rennick's employee number on his O‘ahu State University identity card is OSU20-00457. O‘ahu is spelled incorrectly with an apostrophe rather than an okina (yes, I know ... I spell it wrong all the time too!).
- As Joe White is driving the truck full of bees off the dock, he says "The only easy day was yesterday," the motto of the Navy SEALs.
- Considering how deadly this H5N4 is, it's disturbing how McGarrett opens the empty truck which contained Lange's body at the beginning of the show and the way the Five-0 team stands around looking at Lange being removed from the farm at the show's end.
- There are episodes of the original Five-O with vaguely similar themes:
- Episode 30 -- Sweet Terror -- A terrorist wants to wipe out the Hawaiian sugar cane industry with a fungus so countries will have to buy their sugar from a certain "island" (Cuba, which is not specifically named).
- Episodes 46 & 47 -- Three Dead Cows at Makapuu -- A microbiologist who develops a "biological mutation hostile to all forms of life on earth" comes to Hawaii where he intends to unleash this deadly substance and wipe out all life on Hawaii as a protest against the evils of biological warfare and show that "the world is on the brink of a terrible catastrophe."
- Episode 188 -- A Killer Grows Wings -- A sleazy land developer introduces harmful insect larva into the sugar cane crop on a woman's ranch because he wants her to sell the place to him for peanuts so he can develop a $30 million resort village.
- Bad words: "You weren't really born a crazy son of a bitch" (Grover to McGarrett); "I bet that pissed you off" (Joe to McGarrett).
- When McGarrett tells Joe about his last encounter with Wo Fat where he found out about his mother covering up the murder of Wo's mother, he says "that was a crime." This is pretty funny, considering some of the hijinks he and the Five-0 team have gotten away with in the last five years.
- The February 2nd episode of the CBS show NCIS: Los Angeles is also featuring bioterrorism!
- By the end of the show, we never find out what really motivated Carson, the boss of the operation. Was he trying to ransom someone (like the government) or what?
This episode brought back Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jeff Morrison (Greg Grunberg) as well as gun runner JC Dekker (Xzibit, in his third Five-0 appearance). Morrison has sprung Dekker from Halawa with a fabricated back story involving legal technicalities to help him track down Roman Zednick, a Bulgarian involved in everything "from narcotic trafficking and K&R [kidnapping and ransom] to assassination and piracy." Zednick showed up on Oahu a few days ago, wanting to buy guns.
To meet Zednick, Dekker has to contact him through Sidney Ames (David Cordell), a "concierge for criminals," the local "go-to guy" if you are interested in "weapons, muscle, safe house[s] and body disposal." Strangely, Five-0 has never heard of Ames. After his meeting with Zednick doesn't go well, Dekker is taken away by Ames to be knocked off, but he ends up turning the tables. Despite being shot in the ensuing confrontation and being very badly beaten, Dekker kills Ames and manages to get back to Halawa where he attempts to climb the fence and is shot yet again, which is where the story begins. (Why doesn't he just drive up to the front door of the prison?)
Suffering from a bad case of amnesia because his head hit a rock during the fight with Ames, so much so that he can't even recognize Morrison, Dekker doesn't have any idea what has happened to him after he is brought to the prison area of Kuakini Medical Center (same location as where we saw Paul Delano recently). Five-0 manages to find out how Dekker met Zednick after talking to Odell Martin (Michael Imperioli), a former Eastern US low-level crime figure who was into "bookmaking, cigarettes and weed" and now runs the Moku Cuts barber shop. After they locate the place where the fight with Dekker and Ames took place thanks to some chemical analysis, Chin Ho manages to get info from Ames' cel phone which leads them to a house at 2121 Kahaleo Avenue where Zednick is supposedly staying. Five-0 typically knocks off three of the five people at the house, thus eliminating potential suspects/witnesses. Zednick manages to escape after threatening Morrison and his family, and McGarrett finds a woman named Danielle (Ana Alexander) wounded in a room.
Danielle gets transported to Kuakini as Dekker is slowly figuring out what has happened to him. After he sees her, there is a flashback to when he was at Ames' house where he was told by Danielle that -- surprise! -- she was Roman. (The guy acting as Roman's decoy was really named Emil Hossa (Tudor Munteanu).) This results in a very serious situation as Kono, assigned to be Dekker's nurse, has to deal with Danielle/Roman suddenly becoming Super Villain and taking over their supposedly secure wing of the hospital by cutting the power to the elevator, among other things. (How D/R figures out how to do this boggles the mind.) At one point, Kono takes a hypodermic needle which looks like it is usually used to inoculate horses, draws off some of her blood and dribbles it on the floor to throw D/R off their track as they try to escape. D/R's pursuit of Kono and Dekker climaxes with a tremendous fight between Kono and D/R which ends with Kono taking a pair of defibrillators and applying them to D/R's chest, throwing her across the room and seemingly killing her. Thanks to a brainstorm by McGarrett back in the Five-0 offices that Danielle is Roman, Five-0 arrives shortly after.
While the crime of the week was interesting (as least on a second viewing) though formulaic, the rest of the show was not.
After the main titles, the show began with Kono dithering over her relationship with Adam, telling him his company is a "business that was born out of corruption." In a sequence full of banal dialogue, Adam assures her that he is trying to make everything legitimate, but she isn't convinced. I was all ready to rant about this, but I already ranted about it in May of 2013 in my review of S03E23 and virtually nothing has changed! After having the crap beaten out of her by Danielle/Roman, Kono shows up at Adam's office at the end of the show and asks to become his wife. Now I am a sucker for scenes where Kono looks sad, like when she is gazing at pictures of her and Adam on her phone, but enough is enough and hopefully this will be an end to this soap opera sub-plot which is really sooooo wrong (see my rant)!
The show ended with Jerry (described by Dekker as Five-0's "mascot") driving Adam's Ferrari and singing Dean Martin’s “Ain’t That A Kick In The Head?" At least this sequence was actually filmed outdoors instead of in front of the usual process screen. Allowing Jerry to drive the car was Adam's "payment" for Jerry having coerced some friend at Leonard's Bakery to whip up a batch of macadamia nut malasadas which are usually only produced once a year. This was Adam's peace offering for Kono after their "argument" earlier on. This finale, which went on for far too long, was just plain stupid.
Danno was not in this show, having gone back to New Jersey to deal with some old case of his which came up on appeal. Neither was Max, even at the scene where Ames had been shot dead by Dekker.
MORE TRIVIA:
- After Dekker arrives at the hospital, McGarrett suggests that in order to keep Ramon from getting off the island, they should "kill Dekker" by planting false news reports. Grover says "We need to clear this wing out as well. Even though there's security up here, there's a lot of foot traffic. The less people that see Dekker, the better." Kono then says, "There's another prison ward at King's Medical. We can have the guards transfer EVERYONE there." Morrison replies, "I can get a guy down here to handle security." Kono's word "everyone" is hardly audible. I thought she actually said "him," meaning Dekker, which would make a lot more sense. It would have avoided Danielle/Roman running into Dekker there later ... but then you have to wonder, if this area was so "secure," why did they bring D/R there in the first place?
- When Five-0 confronts Hossa in the Foster Botanical Garden, not only is Morrison -- who Hossa threatened earlier -- present and standing up, quite obvious for Hossa to see (even though he does not), but they seriously endanger all the people in the garden who they order to lie on the ground as they surround Hossa with guns drawn. Hossa is carrying a grenade, which he does not get a chance to use, fortunately.
- Kono says that the last time they dealt with Dekker "he seemed like a changed man." Like Sang Min, Dekker is definitely Five-0's pal now, dispensing romantic advise to Kono concerning her and Adam -- nonsense like "Your boyfriend sounds like a decent guy," "I'm guessing you're the problem; you're the one who can't commit. What's that all about?" and "What you're doin', it ain't cool. If you can't commit by now [after being in a relationship for three years], you need to be fair to the guy and cut him loose. Don't be stringin' him along."
- The license number of the car Ames uses to chauffeur Dekker around (sometimes in the trunk), and which Dekker is seen driving to the Halawa fence at the beginning of the show, is PIV 290.
- The location of Martin's barber shop is a real barber shop, Island Style Cuts at 843 Kapahulu Avenue. Unlike in the Google maps view, it has a barber pole on the wall outside. In the background as McGarrett and Morrison are walking there, you can see the Kapahulu Vista Apartments. Despite the fact that McGarrett and Morrison are seen driving in a location which suggests that this barber shop is out in the sticks, it is really not.
- I thought Morrison was a mainlander, but it doesn't look like this is the case. After he surprises him at Ames' place, Hossa threatens to kill Morrison's family, who are at 2756 Kalawao St. This street number in the closed captions is 2476, as opposed to 2756 as heard in dialogue by Hossa and Grover.
- Jerry tells Kono and Dekker that "I have a little man crush on the guy [Adam]."
- Considering Dekker seems to be bleeding pretty badly during his and Kono's attempt to escape from Danielle, why isn't there any of Dekker's blood on the floor of the laundry room where he hides?
- The book Jerry is seen reading -- The Secret History of Freemasonry by Paul Naudon -- is a real book.
- Bad words: "He's a slippery son of a bitch" (Grover referring to Ames).
The crime of the week part of this episode was not bad.
Roko Makoni (Barkhad Abdi), a warlord from the Congo responsible for brutal kidnappings, rapes and murders during the 2000s and described as "the most wanted man in the world," moved to Hawaii several years ago with the help of Ben Hamilton (Grant Bowler), a CIA "cultural attaché" with the American embassy in Kinshasa. Having faked his death in Africa with the help of Hamilton, Makoni is living a new life under the name of Earl Robinson and working as a taxi driver in Honolulu. But Makoni is recognized by Patrice Thomas (Feikamoh Massaquo), members of whose family were murdered by Makoni in Africa. Thomas came to the States from the Congo as a political refugee and moved to the islands. Thomas contacts Julius Brennan (AJ Buckley), a freelance journalist and documentarian who befriended him while reporting on the Congo conflict and sends him some pictures connected to Makoni. As a result, Brennan also comes to Oahu.
As the show begins, Brennan meets up with Hamilton, who he knew when in the Congo. Hamilton later describes Brennan as acting paranoid and "not the Julius I knew." Shortly after their dinner, Brennan is garrotted in his car by Makoni, who was likely tipped off by Hamilton.
When Max starts examining Brennan's body, he finds writing all over the his chest. Assistant ME Shaw describes this to McGarrett and Danno as hypographia, a "behavioral condition characterized by an intense desire to write." Some of what she and Max say about this condition has been taken almost word-for-word from its Wikipedia entry (see below*). There is also similar writing all over Brennan's hotel room.
Jerry manages to crack this writing's "code." It contains a mark which is "the arrow of Sagittarius ... referring to the zodiac symbol of ancient Babylonian origin representing the soldier" (seriously). This code also contains Thomas's name, and when Five-0 arrive at his apartment, they find him the victim of a staged drug overdose. The Sagittarius symbol is branded on Thomas's body.
Finding photos of Makoni's taxi on Thomas's computer leads Five-0 to the warlord, who pulls out some heavy-duty weaponry and the usual firefight ensues. He escapes because, once again, Five-0 can't hit the side of a barn door, or, in this case, a fleeing hijacked car. Makoni has another taxi than the one he usually uses secreted in some building with a lot of C4 explosive in the trunk. After taking hostages, one of whom he shoots in the stomach, Makoni is surrounded by cops on a Honolulu street (corner of Kapuni and Cleghorn). There McGarrett tries to negotiate with him and he is just about to shoot McGarrett when Kono plugs him from afar with her usual expertise.
There were plenty of opportunities to stretch this plot out to the show's full length. For example, nothing is made of the C4 in the trunk of the taxi. Didn't anyone think that the supposedly clever Makoni would have had some kind of detonation device that he could have used to further threaten everyone? There also could have been connections made between the CIA man Hamilton and McGarrett's mother, hopefully without having Ma McG putting in an appearance.
Unfortunately, far too much of this show was taken up with the usual "family" nonsense. As if to make up for his recent absences, Danno rattled on and on about Gracie getting text messages on her new cel phone from some boy at school who he described as a "little thug" and "predator." (Danno was able to view these messages thanks to some technical screwup by the phone company.) We have heard this before, haven't we? Not only was Danno whining about this as McGarrett dumped some butter in his coffee at the beginning of the show, but then we had to endure further ranting from Danno as they were driving. I must admit that the end of the show, where Danno resolved his "trust" issues with his daughter was touching, but this was during another beery "ohana" finale at a Valentine's Day barbeque where Grover was dressed up in some ridiculous chef's outfit which transformed him into a jazzy version of the guy on the Cream of Wheat box. To top this off, at this party Jerry was seen having the hots for Dr. Shaw as the others looked on, chuckling. Did anyone not figure that when Shaw gave him a rose earlier telling him to give it to someone that he cared about, that she would not be getting this flower back eventually?
MORE TRIVIA:
- Danno uses some peculiar expression when he and McGarrett are driving.
Danno: When I was a kid, if I liked a girl, I had to go up and talk to her, right, like, with my mouth, a human being. Now, any kid with thumbs, a family share plan, gets to walk around, thinking they're the mack.
McGarrett: The mack? You say "the mack?"
Danno: The mack, yeah. I don't know. It's the smooth jazz ["on hold" music on his phone], baby. It's got me thinking about the 90's, you know?- Gracie and her boyfriend are seen hanging out at Via Gelato, an actual Honolulu locale.
- During the hostage-taking, how does Makone know McGarrett's name?
- Max was far less annoying in this episode than usual. He mentioned that he was going to be meeting his girl friend Sabrina for Valentine's Day. He described her his "paramour," a term usually used for "a person with whom someone is having a romantic or sexual relationship and especially a secret or improper relationship." When questioned, Shaw tells him that "I have a date with my Kindle and a nice bottle of Cab," which Max describes as "wonderfully pathetic."
- In the CBS PR material for this show, dated January 22, 2015, Makono's name is Roko Contee and Brennan's is Joseph Boyd. There are two other characters listed, Kee Mun, played by Hoon Lee amd Little Girl, played by Ciara Fortuno, who seemingly do not appear in the show at all.
- Part of the negotiation between Makoni and McGarrett involves a helicopter. To where? It's not going to get to the mainland, that's for sure. Is it going to the airport where a plane awaits him? After he is captured, McGarrett tells Makoni he is going to The Hague, meaning the International Court of Justice.
- Patrice Thomas's driver's license #729K419 shows he lives at 1109 Kahuamaka St., #210 in Pearl City 96782. He is 6'0" and weighs 175 lbs. His date of birth is 04/22/1991. Considering he is 25 years old, why would he be branded with the Sagittarius symbol, since this was supposedly done by Makone on his "kidnapped child soldiers"?
- Brennan is shown interviewing Thomas and his brother Wesley [sic] in the Congo during the conflict years before in a video which Five-0 got very quickly from some editor who worked on it. Rather than being filmed with a single camera, it employs the multi-camera techniques and closeups similar to Five-0's photography.
- Makone's Laulauna Taxi Company license, 2994992-49920, and Hamilton's Diplomatic Immunity Card, #2997543796-0087 have signatures which look like they were written by the same person. The license plate of Makone's taxi is QDI 851. The other taxi he has with the C4 in the trunk has a license YF5 852.
- According to Michael Timothy, Makone's "C4" taxi is a 1995 Ford Crown Victoria. As to whether the driver could control the locks in the manner depicted in the show, Michael says, "There is a rocker switch on the driver's door panel which locks or unlocks all doors. In addition, there is a knob at the top of the door panel for all four doors that runs up or down depending on the master door lock switch. There likely is a power door lock switch on the passenger front door. As originally designed, it is not possible for the driver to lock the rear doors in a fashion such that the rear seat passengers could not unlock and open the doors themselves. Police cars (Crown Victoria Police Interceptor) models of course have that feature, but not a retail sale or fleet sale (cab) car. There may be a switch on the driver door panel that deactivates the power window switch (power window lockout). Indeed the 1968 Park Lane Brougham has such a feature, though it was worthless to McGarrett, as he never ever drove with the windows up. No car with power door locks, however, has had a power lock override."
- The writing on Brennan's chest has disappeared between the time it is originally seen by Max and Shaw and when Jerry comes to the morgue. Presumably it was washed off before the body was sliced open, but isn't this considered evidence?
- *Wikipedia:
Hypergraphia is a behavioral condition characterized by the intense desire to write. Forms of hypergraphia can vary in writing style and content. It is a symptom associated with temporal lobe changes in epilepsy, which is the cause of the Geschwind syndrome, a mental disorder. Structures that may have an effect on hypergraphia when damaged due to temporal lobe epilepsy are the hippocampus and Wernicke's area. Aside from temporal lobe epilepsy, chemical causes may be responsible for inducing hypergraphia. [Note there is nothing mentioned about stress.]
[Under "Characteristics":] Patients with hypergraphia exhibit a wide variety of writing styles and content. While some write in a coherent, logical manner, others write in a more jumbled style (sometimes in a specific pattern).[citation needed]
The Show:
Shaw: It's called hypergraphia. It's a behavioral condition characterized by an intense desire to write. It's a symptom associated with temporal lobe epilepsy and can be triggered by high-stress life events.
Danno: He's had plenty of those.
McGarrett: Yeah, or maybe the stress of thinking somebody's out to kill you. Looks like a code.
Max: That was my first assumption as well, until I took a closer look. (Gives McGarrett a mirror.) The words are backwards.
[Holding the mirror, McGarrett reads several of the words.]
McGarrett: What does this mean? Do you guys understand this?
Shaw: It actually makes sense that it doesn't make sense. Think of it as nervous doodling, a frenzied firing of neurons in the brain.
Max: Some people who suffer from hypergraphia write in a coherent and logical manner. Others, like Mr. Brennan, have a more jumbled style.
This episode, well directed by Joe Dante, could be called "The Tale of Two Psychos."
The first of these was Frank Simpson (David Hoflin), the husband of Amber, Danno's girl friend. Turns out that Amber's real name was Melissa Armstrong and she had married Simpson who abused her so badly she had fled as far away from New York where they lived as possible, i.e., Hawaii.
Danno and Amber (Lili Simmons), making her third appearance on the show, were re-establishing their relationship and spending some time together at an isolated location near Waimanalo. Somehow Simpson managed to track them down, which was odd, because even Five-0 had no idea where Danno was.
Simpson first visited Kamekona's shrimp shack where he inquired about Amber with a photo. This set off alarm bells with the big guy who fortunately snapped a picture of Simpson's car and sent it to McGarrett. Then Simpson made inquiries at Amber's company, though it is equally unlikely that the boss there knew where she was.
Eventually Simpson ended up at the romantic retreat where he knocked out Danno and threatened his ex-wife in a very nasty manner. After Danno punched the shit out of Simpson, getting stabbed in the process, he and Amber were leaving on their way to the hospital when Simpson suddenly appeared out of nowhere and made further threats. Amber drove right into her ex, with the result he flew up on to the roof of the car and then back down in front of it via the hood (a great stunt). Amber then drove over him like she would a speed bump, a move that I suspect will return to bite her in the ass eventually, even though she and Danno were seemingly the only witnesses. (Don't forget the "old lady" of season one who fingered Kono!)
The second psycho on the show was Jason Duclair, played by former UFC fighter Randy Couture. Duclair was a serial arsonist who had terrorized people in California, then relocated to Hawaii. Posing as an exterminator, he cased people's houses, then returned to burn the places down with the people trapped inside.
Duclair was pursued by ATF agent Kathy Milwood (Melina Kanakaredes) from Orange County, who had followed his early career of two dozen fires. She nearly lost her life when Duclair torched her house, killing her husband, after she taunted him during a TV press conference where she called him a "weak, frightened coward" who was sexually dysfunctional.
Duclair was extremely nasty, grabbing and knocking out Milwood as she followed him into the Lava Gardens Hotel where he was going to climax his career with a big-time blaze. He doused her with White Spark camp fuel and was just about to incinerate her when McGarrett broke into the room via the next room and the balcony between them.
Kanakaredes' acting was exceptionally good -- too bad she cannot stick around to join the team! As she was leaving at the end of the episode, McGarrett told her "Don't look back, you can't change the past," again pretty funny, considering what a mess his own life is. The acting of the two villains was also very good.
There was a stupid sub-plot about McGarrett and Grover playing golf which took up about six minutes of the show's time. It featured U.S. Women's Open golf champion Michelle Wie giving advice to McGarrett and acting as his caddy as he participated in a charity tournament for the HPD Widows and Orphans Fund. The less said about this, the better. No doubt the gorgeously photographed shots of golf course scenery were designed to ensure that the show continues to qualify for Hawaii state production tax credits .
MORE TRIVIA:
- When Chin is talking to McGarrett about trying to locate Danno, having figured out that Amber's husband is after her, he says "I'll reach out to friends and [or "at"?] work and see if anyone knows anything [i.e., where Danno and Amber are]." Shortly after, Duke tells Chin "My boys spoke to one of Amber's co-workers; he said that their boss might know where Amber and Danny are. He also said that an old friend of hers came by the office this morning, asking the same question. We're trying to track down the boss. As soon as that information comes in, I'll get it to you." But it is never specifically said that the boss told the husband where Amber was. No matter how the husband identified himself, either as her husband or an "old friend," and the boss knew about Danno's relationship with Amber, because Danno had phoned him to get her off work (or some other reason), why would he?
- Duclair's character was very reminiscent of the classic Five-O and Zero character Hookman the way he kept newspaper clippings of his crimes (but framed!) on his wall. At the end, Duclair fingers a book of matches he seemingly lifted from his prison guard, reminiscent of the "surprise" ending of Woe to Wo Fat, final episode of the original show.
- Trying to find Duclair at the Lava Gardens Hotel (a bogus place), Five-0 goes to room 2104, which, according to the hotel, the killer checked into. But on the 18th floor we saw him get out of the elevator he shared with a family and go into a room directly opposite the elevator. (The room door does not close after he enters -- obviously so the camera can follow him in.) When Five-0 don't find anything in room 2104, they go out into the hall, and you see a room with number 2110. But as they are standing opposite the elevator where they see Milwood's blood on the elevator floor, behind them on the wall is another sign which indicates where rooms 1808 to 1834 are. There is no explanation as to how the Duclair either books the room on the 18th floor or gets the key card to open the door. It seems a stretch that Five-0 notices the blood in the elevator, considering there are three of them.
- Five-0 figures out Duclair is at the Lava Gardens because he left his computer running at his house where Five-0 breaks in, trying to find him. There is an e-mail regarding the hotel reservation right on the computer screen which McGarrett sees! Talk about stupid writing. Why wouldn't Duclair turn the computer off, since he has left the house? There are also questions about how Duclair could board up the front door of houses he is torching to keep its occupants from escaping during the fire without them hearing him do this.
- Duclair's exterminator license number is 45X2-ZY2Z-XY1. He works for the No Vacancy Pest Control.
- It takes just over half an hour to drive from Waimanalo to the Tripler Army Medical Center.
- Simpson's New York driver's license #B4259103K shows his address as 1813 Herkimer Street, Brooklyn 11209. (An actual street, though no such address.) He was born 08-08-81. The license expires 08-09-18. Amber's driver's license under her married name #B3486162M shows her birthdate as 06-09-84. It was issued 06-30-14 and expires 07-01-18. The issue date is odd, because Danno first met Amber in the episode broadcast on 01-10-14.
- Milwood uses the expression "son of a bitch" twice.
I really hated this show, a major contender for Worst Episode of Five-Zero Ever. If had to give it a name, other than the one above, I would have called it "Two Men and a Pussy" (TMAAP).
This was a major league apartment-gument between McGarrett and Danno. Overall, the show was much worse than the similar S03E03 which I also did not like, where the duo were marooned, afloat on a boat.
My notes taken during TMAAP were littered with comments like "Stupid!!" and "Shut up!!" It began with a two minute and 41 second continuation of the Governor-sanctioned psychological therapy for McGarrett and Danno seen in this season's premiere episode, S05E01, and went downhill from there.
What I hated the most was the music which had the usual plink-plunk associated with "comedic" and/or "cute" scenes throughout, because -- among other things -- the incessant arguing between McGarrett and Danno, who were "working on their relationship," was supposed to be funny, but it was not. The music score was probably the worst one yet heard on the show.
After a jewellery store is robbed, McGarrett and Danno set up shop with cameras and phone taps across from the apartment of one of the suspects, Emma Mills (the very attractive -- read: large-breasted -- Jessica Lowndes). The comic-relief characters who dropped by, including neighbor Ruth Tennenbaum (Cloris Leachman) and geeky dope dealer Ricky Schiff (Charlie Saxton) as well as the non-stop chatter between McGarrett and Danno really drove me crazy. Much of the show played like a bad version of Hitchcock's Rear Window.
The woman named Agnes whose apartment they are commandeering is a serious cat lady. This leads to interaction between McGarrett, who confesses his liking for cats, which he describes as "ninjas," and the resident feline, Mr. Pickles, in scenes designed to appeal to Facebook cat-video fanatics. (Danno tells us that he is a dog kind of guy.)
As if this isn't dumb enough, McGarrett enlists the help of Jerry to try and track down who recently stole Mrs. Tennenbaum's fern. Comedian Jon Lovitz appeared as Barry Burns, a pawnshop-like merchant in "gold and unwanted jewelry" seen on local TV in sleazy commercials who is acting as fence for Emma's $3 million worth of stolen loose diamonds.
The scene at the end where Emma's partner and bad guy Jacob Anders/Radomir Ivanovich (Zoltan Hayth) shot up the jewellery store in a manner like The Terminator where he wounded or killed at least half a dozen cops was in very bad taste, especially considering the cutesy-poo finale outside Kamekona's shrimp shack which came after this.
This episode was Daniel Dae Kim's TV directing debut. While the script was terrible, the directing itself was not bad, and I have really nothing else to say about this, because the whole episode was so distracting, other than "I guess he has to start somewhere," and "I wish him well in his future endeavours."
MORE TRIVIA:
- Despite all the show's faults, I laughed like hell when Leachman's character told McGarrett and his "partner" Danno "I fully support gay marriage." After she left, Danno had a snappy response: "I personally would have gone with the gay thing to keep our cover." Danno also had another good line, saying the apartment they were using "smell[ed] like loneliness and despair," to which McGarrett said the smell was mothballs.
- "Family values" WWW sites are not going to be happy with this episode, especially the scene where Emma is revealed to be in cahoots with Mia Price from the jewelery store (Arden Cho) and the two are in a lesbian relationship. They are seen kissing and later McGarrett is listening to them making out.
- The book given to McGarrett and Danno at the beginning of the show for "homework" is The Perfect Partners' Workbook: Exercises in Conflict Resolution and Team Building by Susan Rothman. There actually is a marriage and family therapist in California named Susan Rothman, who, according to her WWW page, is "a practicing zen student and lead[s] a group called 'Being Mindful'." But as far as I can determine, this book and its author are both bogus.
- Conan O'Brien's drummer/band leader Max Weinberg, seen in the remake of Hookman where Danno had another idiotic whiny rant, reappeared as gunshop owner Norm. He had a serious run-in with Anders, who beat him up and stole small and large firearms plus body armor and explosives. (Are these all items one could obtain in a gun shop in the USA?)
- Anders is a member of Serbian special forces who participated in the Bosnian war, a tiresome trope for bad guys on the show.
- Not only was the music bad in the scene where Anders extracted a bullet from his stomach (put there by his partner Emma at the beginning of the show) but it was overbearingly LOUD, something I get at least one complaint a week about through my WWW site from people who think the site is officially connected to CBS.
- Emma's apartment is in the art-deco style Waikiki Cove located at 2118 Kuhio Avenue. When Danno calls for an ambulance to deal with her injuries, he says the address is 2119 Kuhio, apartment 503.
- Not be overly picky, since this show is "fiction," but the building from which McGarrett and Danno are surveilling, shown briefly in a frontal view, is also on Kuhio Avenue, and their window faces the street. So, if this was "real life," they would not be able to see into Emma's building at all. As well, the window frame in her room is different than what can be seen on the art deco building through Google Maps, though that picture may have been taken several years ago. When McGarrett and Danno enter her room, they do it through a sliding glass door, and the only place these are located on the building (from what I can see) is via the balconies of the apartments. Are McGarrett and Danno leaping across balconies like McGarrett did in the last show? There is also a fire hose on the right of Emma's window through which McGarrett is spying, which does not make sense, because this would probably be in a hallway in the building. When Mia Price visits Emma, the two of them go into what looks like a bedroom off to the left (from Five-0's viewpoint), but later McGarrett is watching them have sex in silhouette, presumably in the living room, since that's where his camera is focused. (The second computer on the right of the table is used to communicate with the Five-0 office, among other things.)
- The scene where gunshots and screams are heard from Emma's building on the third day of the stakeout confused me. I thought that the couple fighting was Anders and Emma, but it was not. It was some other couple two floors down at the end of the building. Although I did not recognize them (i.e., not Anders and Emma), McGarrett and Danno, using binoculars, did not either, which is interesting, because you would expect they would, because they have been watching the building for three days. I don't know how they can hear these screams and two gunshots, because the windows of this couple's room appear to be closed. McGarrett and Danno run outside and over to Emma's building and they go to this couple's apartment which is empty, saying "We just got played." (The room looks like someone was painting in it, vaguely reminiscent of a scene in Hookman in the room above Norm's gun shop.) Then they go to Emma's condo two floors up and find her mortally wounded by Anders. When I asked questions about this on IMDb, member fishead924 there suggested that Anders arranged for the couple on the third floor to stage the fight to draw McGarrett and Danno away from Emma's room where he was shooting her and taking the diamonds. Even if Anders hired these people to distract the stakeout, how much time would this buy him? Does he expect that McGarrett and Danno, who he obviously realizes are watching, would go and help the other couple, maybe because it is "the thing to do" (i.e., a domestic dispute is not good) or it will interfere with their surveillance? On the stakeout camera footage viewed later after the commercial, Anders doesn't seem to take a long time after he plugs Emma, so it's odd that McGarrett and Danno don't run into him on their way up to her room. The bottom line is: this is yet more sloppy writing on the show with the usual "means -- no matter how stupid -- justifies the end" kind of logic.
- We find out in this episode that McGarrett used to play the guitar, something Jack Lord's Steve McGarrett also did. He gave up his musical career when he was traumatized during a grade ten talent show. The actor playing the young McGarrett, Taylor John Smith, had little resemblance to Alex O'Loughlin. Not to be too cynical or anything, but I thought considering the "comedic" angle of the show, maybe they should have done an Airplane-like spoof and had the young McGarrett played by a black guy.
- The phone number for Barry Burns' company Gold Blast USA is 555-0101 (no area or 1-800 code).
- Danno says that his favorite music is Bon Jovi: "I could tell you about every song he ever wrote." In retrospect, this is pretty funny, because on YouTube there are videos of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog attending a Bon Jovi concert in New Jersey where he ridicules the people attending as morons.
- Jessica Lowndes, the female "bad guy" and one of the few things worth watching during this show, especially when she peeled off her clothes, is from Vancouver, my home town. Interestingly, in S01E09, the execrable Po'ipu (Siege), Emmanuelle Vaugier, the villain, was equally attractive, and also from Vancouver. Alas, both of these women were knocked off. I was recently "studying" Krista Allen, another good-looking actress who appeared in S04E18. She was not knocked off and not from Vancouver, but it looks like she might have made several soft-corn porno movies (do a Google search for her and feel free to post in the Five-0 Discussion Forum with your take on this).
This show, with a script by Lenkov and Solarz, was actually pretty good up to a point (to be discussed shortly). It had nonstop action with characters running into and out of scenes with high tension as two of Five-0 were taken out of action, plus very good villains. It should really have been a two-parter.
After a flashback to Danno knocking off "drug dealing scumbag" Marco Reyes earlier this season, it began with McGarrett tossing a football around with Nahele Huikala (Kekoa Kekumano), the troubled youth who stole his car in S05E12. As usual, fun is interrupted by a phone call, in this case Joe White acting as the Harbinger of Doom, telling McGarrett that Danno is in really big trouble.
Danno is talking to his daughter Gracie's class about police work along with Max when two Federal Marshals show up and take Danno away, arrested for murder, specifically that of Reyes. McGarrett cannot get into the Federal Detention Center to talk to Danno, who is being grilled by Ben Alexander, a slimy "State Department" type (meaning CIA), well played by Raphael Sbarge.
As if this isn't bad enough, Chin Ho is busted by Rex Coughlin from HPD Internal Affairs (Robert Knepper, giving an equally oily performance), who was on Chin's ass in S04E13. The charge is "bribery, tax evasion, criminal misconduct and conspiracy to commit murder," all relating to the money which Chin "borrowed" from his incarcerated brother-in-law Gabriel Waincroft (Christopher Sean) to help Danno pay Reyes the $18.5 million ransom for his brother Matt.
Much of this harkened back to episodes of the classic series where the theme was along the lines of "some member of Five-O is soo screwed, how will he get out of this mess?"
Joe White provides a lot of the answers, thanks to a flash drive he picks up in Chinatown in a package of hard packed Carolina Menthol cigarettes. It seems that Reyes was connected to some Colombian cocaine cartel's money laundering scheme. Money invested by Wall Street bankers in the Colombian housing market ended up in this scheme, and without the flow of drugs and money continuing after a subsequent Colombian government crackdown, the U.S. economy would have been in serious trouble. Reyes was in charge of moving the coke under the watchful eye of the CIA. Reyes knew the location of $1.3 billion (3 tons) worth of coke, information about which disappeared with Reyes' murder.
Despite Alexander mentioning the word "lawyer," Danno waives extradition to Colombia and gets flown to a prison there which makes the archetypal bad Turkish one in the movie Midnight Express look like Disneyland by comparison. Danno is subjected to brutality from both the prisoners and guards at this joint far beyond that which any human can endure.
After McGarrett manages to buy time from Alexander, Joe gets further intel that the cocaine, which no one, including the Colombian government, can locate, is probably in an oil refinery owned by an old Reyes front man which has been off line for several years, but now has multiple security guards protecting it. Add to this the fact that during his encounter with Reyes, Danno's brother's body came delivered to him in an OIL DRUM (duh!).
All they have to do now is go to Colombia and locate the cocaine, which they do even though 9 hours of the 48 hour grace period granted by Alexander have already expired. Considering a direct flight to Bogota from Honolulu takes about 12 hours (that is 24 hours return), this does not give them a lot of time, especially since once arriving there they have to drive about 120 miles to the town of Ortega where they track down Frank Bama (Jimmy Buffett), Joe White's/Five-0's pal fomerly in South Korea who, without any explanation whatsoever, is now in Colombia. This is the "point" at which the show goes totally stoopid, degenerating into the usual A-Team adventure that results whenever Bama is around, with the Five-0 team (McGarrett, Kono, Grover and White) flying to the oil refinery in a helicopter which looks like a "washing machine with propellers."
If this wasn't ridiculous enough, the story suddenly jumps back to Honolulu where the returned McGarrett confronts Alexander, telling him that the cocaine was destroyed by the Five-0 team and they also found Reyes' books which reveal Alexander to be seriously involved in the whole dope-smuggling business. (Presumably these "books" were of the cover-your-ass variety.) McGarrett tells Alexander he wants Danno returned to Honolulu ASAP after which he strongly recommends that Alexander retire from the intelligence agency ... and guess what ... it all comes to pass!
My notes for the show kept a running track of times during events as the show came closer to its end with comments like "how can they resolve this?" The last five minutes of the show were taken up with Danno's return and Joe White telling McGarrett that ... surprise, surprise ... the one who spilled the beans on where the cocaine that Reyes was involved with was hidden was McGarrett's goddamn mother! (This is why McGarrett seemingly got preferential treatment to Danno, despite the fact that both of them were present at Reyes' murder.) Get lost!!
Chin Ho's dilemma was resolved in a much simpler way. Gabriel, who was supposedly going to testify against the arrested Chin, was taken to a well-protected safe house. After striking a deal with Coughlin for transfer to a minimum security prison, Gabriel is about to sign the paperwork which Coughlin has drawn up, when he fatally stabs the IA cop in the eye with the pen and escapes (though to where is a good question)! No Gabriel means no case against Chin, though you would wonder why Coughlin didn't get his testimony recorded or witnessed by some other cops.
Aside from the idiotic time-compressed ending of the show, I found the total immorality of the arrested characters with respect to their charges disturbing, particularly Chin Ho. Coughlin told him bluntly, "You took drug money from a cop killer. No matter how it was used, that's still a crime." Chin's excuse was "I 'borrowed' that money to help pay for that man's [Danno's brother's] ransom." Even a teary-looking Kono got into the act, saying that Chin was "losing everything that he ever worked and fought for his entire life." Danno, on the other hand, seemed more contrite when returning home after his prison experience.
MORE TRIVIA:
- During the question and answer with Danno and Max, some smart ass student in the class asks Max "Ever find anything weird in the poop chute?," a line which surely rates as one of the all-time tasteless on this or any other TV show. Max replied, "Young man, if you're referring to the anus or the descending colon [it sounds like he says "semi-colon"], then the answer is 'Yes'."
- According to McGarrett, Max takes Gracie to "Rachel's place," meaning Danno's ex-wife, but she has been missing in action from the show for a very long time, supposedly living now in Las Vegas. Maybe Rachel and her husband Stan still maintain a place in Hawaii with full-time servants where Gracie can be taken care of. After all, who looks after her while Danno is at work?
- When Joe plugs his flash drive this into the Supercomputer in the Five-0 office, it doesn't look like it has a standard USB connector, even though we saw that in the previous scene.
- McGarrett confronts Alexander, telling him that "this man [Danno] was denied counsel ... that's a violation of his civil rights." Considering the 57 varieties of violation of civil rights committed on the show in the last four years, this is a pretty funny line.
- Joe tells McGarrett "we earned our Trident today," referring to the U.S. Navy's Special Warfare insignia, also known as a "SEAL Trident." At the end, Joe seemingly is following McGarrett at a distance because after McGarrett drops Danno off, Joe suddenly appears out of nowhere.
- The episode also harkened back to classic Five-O shows where McGarrett was jerked around by the Feds. But do U.S. Marshals really have the kind of super power seen in this episode? McGarrett, who usually flashes the "immunity and means" card, seemed reduced to a total state of impotence by their actions.
- The music was improved a bit over last week's, especially the passages which aped John Powell's classic scores for the Bourne movies like when Joe was in Chinatown.
This episode was not bad, falling into the category of "how could it be worse than the one(s) that preceded it?" (both of which were major stinkers).
Unfortunately, there was a very stupid sub-plot of Jerry getting mistaken for a home invader robbing and attacking divorced women. The show began with Jerry getting picked out of an HPD lineup by one of the victims with "beyond a reasonable doubt" certainty.
Chin, Grover and Kono did the investigative work trying to get Jerry sprung from becoming what Jerry called "the next Hurricane Carter," referring to the boxer who spent almost 20 years in prison for a crime he did not commit.
It turned out that three of the invader's victims all used the same law firm (Kaio and Reed), so it didn't take much effort to track down the culprit who worked there. The guy turned out to be a big Samoan-looking dude with long hair, but the bigness and hair were where the resemblance to Jerry ended.
The crime of the week (or, more specifically, big action of the week) happened in and around the barber shop of Odell Martin (Michael Imperioli reappearing after only 5 episodes). Much of the acting in this part of the show was very good.
McGarrett was getting a shave at some early hour of the morning, like around 6 a.m. -- probably the first time O'Loughlin's McGarrett has appeared clean-shaven on the show since it began, if I recall correctly. This was a new barber shop because it ends up looking like Swiss cheese after a bunch of Armenian gangsters shoot it up. (The previous location in S05E14 is a local landmark).
These bad guys are after Eran (Steven Krueger), a young guy who flees inside. Eran, who has been shot in the knee, says he was working at his job at the Hoapili Bakery on Palolo Avenue (bogus business, real street) and witnessed these Armenian dudes executing some guy.
After the gangsters, led by Ari Bailan (Ivo Nandi), spray the shop with automatic weapon fire, McGarrett soon runs out of ammunition. Odell manages to lock the drop-down metal gate in a scene which is ridiculous, because as he does this, a bullet comes flying towards him in slow motion. Bullets do not really fly in slow motion, and if this was real life, Odell would be toast! After a very long time, an HPD cop eventually shows up in response to phone calls about the shooting, but he is dispatched with a bullet to the head.
Barricaded in the shop with bad guys both at the front and back doors and Odell's closed-circuit TV disabled, McGarrett is at his wits' end, only to discover Bailan cutting his way into the place with a chainsaw through the Kahanu Flower Shop next door. This leads to a very cool stunt with not one, but two guys becoming human torches as Odell and McGarrett fashion a Molotov cocktail from various barbering supplies like hair dye and after shave.
McGarrett gets Odell to drive Eran to King's Medical Center after Eran is further wounded during the final confrontation with the gangsters. But on the way there, Eran grabs a gun that McGarrett gave Odell and gets him to drive to a marina.
Meanwhile, McGarrett confronts the local Armenian gang boss, Garig Dobrian (Mark Ivanir).
Odell has already provided McGarrett with info about this guy, who relocated from Los Angeles where the trope of an Armenian gang was already used a lot on The Shield, a show which co-starred Alex O'Loughlin. Odell describes Dobrian as "ruthless. Drugs, shakedowns, insurance scams -- got his hands in all of it. He owns the Rainbow Valley Supermarket over on Palolo Avenue, but that place is just a front."
It turns out that Dobrian is Eran's father, and that he ordered his men to kill his son, who he calls "a sick boy, touched by the devil," after he found out that his son was involved in the murder of several children. Somehow Dobrian knows that McGarrett was trying to protect his son, saying "I had to make it right, but my associates failed to stop him."
The show ends with McGarrett shooting Eran dead at the docks (yet another suspect!) and then finding evidence to close this case, though you have to wonder why HPD never did this, considering how many children were seemingly killed, judging by the stack of photos McGarrett looks through, bringing to mind the line about how such events can rock even the most hardened investigators.
MORE TRIVIA:
- Danno was not in this show. McGarrett said "he'll be back in a week," without specifying where he was. In fact, the rest of Five-0, investigating Jerry's dilemma, had nothing to do with McGarrett at all during the show.
- There are three pictures shown of the home invader's victims. The first of these, Susan Lipsberg, has a large cut on her right lip in her photo, but not when she fingers Jerry in the lineup. The other two women are named Carol Oyama and Mary Washimura.
- Odell's new shop is supposedly located in the 1200 block of Queen Street (1284 precisely), which a look at Google Maps will disprove. This address is actually located quite close to the beach in Ala Moana Beach Park, though.
- McGarrett commits a major faux pas when he leaves his cel phone in his Silverado while having a shave, so he cannot call HPD after the shooting starts. As well, Odell had "a falling out with the phone company years ago," and he "[doesn't] do cell phones." If so, you have to wonder how did McGarrett contact Odell to "open up early, [and] sacrifice your morning paddle, all for my schedule."
- While moving stuff around in the shop, McGarrett finds Odell's diploma for law school, specifically Fordham University. The date he received his degree was May 10, 1972. Michael Imperioli is only 48 years old, which would probably be much younger than someone who received this degree after spending three to four years after getting a bachelors' degree at university. In other words, Imperioli's character would probably be in his mid-60's, at least! When telling McGarrett that he had had enough of studying law after he got this degree, Odell uses the expression "wela ka hao," which translates as "strike while the iron is hot."
- Grover is Mr. Potty-Mouth again, calling Chin's brother-in-law a "sick son of a bitch," and telling Tauna Lahani (Pogi Tevaga), the suspect in the home invasions, "I don't think you got the stones [balls] to run, do you?"
- Max, who is Jerry's alibi, tells Chin reluctantly the night before Jerry was arrested that the two of them were at a Magic: The Gathering tournament which features geeky trading cards. Max pocketed a pile of money at this tournament, though, according to Wikipedia, "The gambling rule is forbidden at sanctioned events and is now mostly a relic of the past, though it still sees occasional usage in friendly games."
- At the end of the show, how does McGarrett know where Odell and Eran are?
- During the first meeting Chin had with Jerry while the latter was in jail, there was actually NO MUSIC for about 50 seconds. Amazing! The sound mix for this show was unusually bad, by the way, especially when heard on a relatively low-fi system.
- When talking to Chin, Jerry makes reference to Locked Up Abroad, a National Geographic Channel reality show about people who have been arrested while travelling.
- Paulette Franco, who plays the cashier in the store where Bailan buys the chainsaw, played Barbara Soong on the original series episode “Man on Fire.”
Powerhouse acting by Chi McBride was the main feature of this show.
Clay Maxwell (Mykelti Williamson), Grover's old police buddy from Chicago, and his wife Diane (Kim Wayans) are visiting Hawaii, celebrating their twentieth wedding anniversary, and the three of them with Grover's wife Renee (Michelle Hurd) are shown hanging out at a restaurant. The next morning, Grover has hardly recovered from his hangover when he gets a call from Clay who says that he and Diane were out hiking in the Kualoa Mountain Range when Diane slipped and fell off a cliff to her death.
Grover hurries to the scene, but soon starts to get suspicious over this turn of events, because he knows Maxwell is very manipulative based on something which happened when the two of them were at the police academy years before, among other things. The rest of Five-0 can't believe that everything is not as Clay reported it, especially McGarrett. Chin and Kono do the usual investigation of the couple's financial records, but find nothing.
Grover wants to get his hands on Maxwell's cel phone, which seems odd, considering Chin would normally snoop in the call history records and so forth. I'm sure Grover knows what the cel phone number is, and could have given it to Chin. Grover asks his wife to get the phone, which almost puts her in danger from Clay, who "has a temper." Eventually she does get it, and in record time, Grover finds a photo of Maxwell with LeAnn Stockwell, an attractive woman who is a trainer at a gym Clay frequents who Clay describes as "some piece I had on the side."
This leads to a confrontation in the blue-lit room, but despite some very heavy threats by Grover, Maxwell does not give in. And there is no reason why he should, since all the evidence which Grover has amassed so far is strictly circumstantial despite the fact that Grover makes a big deal about how information on the phone which is removed (like pictures of Clay with LeAnn which he shows to his now-former friend) can be undeleted. Grover says he will return to the mainland and track down every bit of evidence that he can use to put Maxwell away for good. But you will notice that Grover does not say that he found any deleted text messages on the phone with words to the effect that Maxwell and his girl friend wanted the wife to die, or for him to kill her, for example.
There was a sub-plot with Danno and Mindy Shaw that, by my rough calculations, took up about 20% of the show. It was inconsequential. It was difficult to hear what the two of them were saying at the beginning of the show because the sound mix was so crappy, but they ended up stuck in an elevator with a dead body on the way to the morgue with no connection to the outside world, either through the elevator intercom or their cel phones. Danno had a panic attack because of his claustrophobia and Dr. Shaw calmed him down, including some physical contact which, like Scott Caan's returning presence , seemed designed to raise the level of chatter among women fans who are crying big tears because Caan has been away from the show recently. Before being rescued by Officer Pua Kai, Shaw dug a bullet out of the corpse which, when combined with some fingerprint evidence, was quick to establish who the killer was, summarily arrested by Danno near the show's end.
MORE TRIVIA:
- When in the elevator, Dr. Shaw starts out her quick autopsy of the corpse by stating the date, which is the actual date of the show: April 3, 2015.
- Someone on IMDb was saying "how could Grover leave his wife alone with this guy [Maxwell, when they let him stay at Grover's house]," but this doesn't make sense, because the guy is not a psycho killing women, just his own wife. If he knocked off Grover's wife as well, then suspicion would fall on him for his own wife's murder like a ton of bricks. From my true crime reading days, I am aware of cases where husbands killed their wives (usually multiple wives, often to get insurance) ... and they don't get caught until some clever cop figures out a pattern which might involve the wives falling off a cliff (i.e., being pushed off), as in the case of Randy Roth.
- Richard Yeager (Christian Martin), who murdered his business partner (the dead guy at the beginning of the show who ends up in the elevator with Danno and Shaw), actually says he wants to speak to his lawyer when arrested by Danno!
- The music had a big climax when Grover exclaimed, "He [Maxwell] DID THIS!"
- When Grover talks to his wife about his theory that Clay murdered Diane after Clay goes to get some rest in a bedroom at their house after his ordeal, their conversation seems very loud, at the level where I'm sure that Clay could hear them talking.
- McGarrett was also on screen about 20% of the time. Kono and Chin were seen less than 10%.
While setting this show at an Elvis impersonator get-together in Honolulu was potentially a good idea, some of the script by David Wolkove almost seemed as if the writer had never seen past shows, which is odd, because Wolkove has been involved as executive story editor, story editor, the author of the story, the teleplay or the script itself for a very large number of episodes.
The show began with not one, but two “previously on Five-0” sequences which wasted just over two minutes of time. One of these was easier to understand why it was included, being a prelude to the conclusion of last week’s show where Grover told his former friend and fellow cop Clay Maxwell, suspected of spousal homicide, that he would go to Chicago and do everything he could to “lock [Maxwell’s] ass up.” The other flashback went back three and four episodes where respectively (1) there was a major jewellery heist (a show co-written by Wolkove) and (2) Chin was arrested by Internal Affairs investigator Coughlin as part of his brother-in-law Gabriel’s plan to get out of jail and Gabriel later murdered Coughlin.
You have to wonder why these two sequences appeared in the show at all, though these summaries have been more frequent this season. Are the number of people watching the show dropping, or is it just their attention spans? Or is this intended to provide continuity for the show when broadcast in syndication, assuming that it is not broadcast in the same order it is shown, or what? After all, we’re only talking about a range of five episodes, and there have been plot threads across multiple episodes in the show previously where viewers didn’t have to be reminded of what happened before in this manner.
Following this, we jumped to the Memphis Forever Tribute at the bogus Walani Hotel, where former Hawaiian rock star/now Elvis “tribute artist” Lane Collins (Peter Dobson) was singing “Burning Love” to an enthusiastic crowd before keeling over and dying shortly after. The sound mix for this part of the show was typically terrible, though probably just as well, because it covered up trivia spouted by the Elvis-costumed Jerry (a theme throughout the show, much to Danno’s annoyance) and lines by Max –- dressed as Elvis’s manager Colonel Tom Parker -- like the ridiculous “It takes serious sartorius muscles to pull off pelvic gyrations like that.”
Collins’ death was no accident, according to Max, but murder after someone put cyanide in a bottle of Cardigan’s Bourbon found in Collins’ dressing room. Suspicious minds drifted towards a suspect in Kaleo Fisher (Evan Gamble), formerly a guitarist in Collins’ popular group Freelance Riot, who has recently been abusing Collins on Twitter. When confronted at a hotel where he is singing songs like Eddie Money's "Two Tickets to Paradise" to tourists, Fisher says “Social media isn’t the best place to express yourself.” One wonders if anything should be read into this. considering the problems former star of the show Michelle Borth had in this area. Fisher did not kill Collins, but points McGarrett and Grover in the direction of someone who likely did.
In the sequence that followed, I found the treatment by McGarrett and Grover of Jane Miller (Calico Cooper), a fan so obsessed with Collins to the extent she killed him to "to protect his legacy," so "people will remember him for what he really was" very mean-spirited, unlike anything “previously seen” on the show when dealing with suspects. Handcuffed in the blue-lit room, any feelings of respect for her quickly went out the window with lines like this:
McGarrett: I'm pretty sure that Lane knew you were obsessed with him. It's just too bad that he didn't know how certifiably crazy you are.
Grover [a couple of minutes later, as he is leaving]: Whew, you're crazy.
McGarrett [later, outside the room]: So, I mean, how's the irony completely lost on this woman? The inspiration for killing her idol is the song she got the words wrong to.
Grover: Well, what'd you expect? The girl's 118 pounds of crazy.
While Miller really did kill Collins, blurting out a confession at about the halfway point of the show, she was yet another red herring in the big scheme of things because a comment by the trivia-obsessed Jerry led Danno to the man who designed Collins’ jewel-studded Elvis outfit which was just not what it should have been. This guy was found dead on the floor of his local costume supply business almost at the same time as three masked men entered the medical examiner’s office and stole Collins’ body (and his costume), holding Max at gunpoint.
Collins’ body is found close by shortly after, and one of the jewels left on his body yields a serial number on a diamond which is connected to the robbery a few episodes before, leading Five-0 to sleazy pawnshop owner and fence Barry Burns (Jon Lovitz, returning). Forced to spend his time at home with an ankle monitor restricting his movements, Burns has had visits from people inquiring about the location of the jewels from the robbery. In one of the few big laughs in the show, he tells McGarrett that if he didn’t get a deal from Five-0 to avoid jail, he’d “probably be someone’s prison bitch right now.”
His protestations to the contrary, it later turns out that Burns knew the location of the diamonds, which were in a private locker in a wine cellar, placed there by Radomir Ivanovic, the man who stole them. You will recall Radomir was gunned down by HPD at the end of the robbery episode. Burns assembled a “crew” to get these diamonds and arranged for the jewels to be sewn into the Elvis getup. These men would join the “Elvii” (Jerry’s annoying term) when they returned to the mainland and thus escape detection.
But Collins picked up the wrong outfit from the designer, leading to his involvement in this complicated plot. To make matters worse, Ivanovic’s brother Adrian (Ilia Volok), accused of committing war crimes in Bosnia, as well as extortion, kidnapping and murder for hire, is on the trail of the gems and arrives in Honolulu to threaten Burns, who spills the beans about his crew, who are promptly murdered by Adrian in room 1650 of the Walani Hotel. Adrian dons the jewelled outfit and attempts to flee, but the usual idiotic firefight ensues outside the hotel and he is killed by McGarrett, to whom Kono says “Nice shot, boss.”
Since there are seven minutes left in the show at this point, you know what is coming: drinks, this time at Rumfire, a bar located in the Sheraton Waikiki Resort (one of the show’s sponsors). Here we are treated to Jerry singing another hit from “the King,” Love Me. Jorge Garcia does a creditable job with this imitation, but there was a major element of “Puh-leeze” to what took up almost two minutes of show time.
But wait, there’s more! Chin is on his way to Rumfire when he is called by Gabriel, who says that there is something of interest back at Chin’s house, so Chin skedaddles there fast. By the time he arrives, the bomb squad has already checked out the place and found nothing. A cop hands Chin an envelope which contains pictures of Kono’s boyfriend Adam Noshimuri with some Asian guy who I originally thought to be his father Hiro (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), who we have not seen since Ua Hopu (Caught), episode 22 from season 2, where it was assumed that he was the bloody mess in Wo Fat’s bathtub in Japan. But I was told this is not correct and on checking, I discovered both of the actors in this photo, Ian Anthony Dale and Tagawa, are around 6 feet tall, which the older man is plainly not. Presumably this older guy is some Japanese yakuza boss (or maybe Wo Fat's father??), to be determined in an upcoming show, obviously leading up to what is supposedly the Kono-centric episode to come this season.
MORE TRIVIA:
- When Grover returns and is met by McGarrett at the airport, he says that he has several pizzas from Malnati's, a famous Chicago-area restaurant, in his suitcase. Grover did not make any headway trying to get evidence against his former pal, since the pal's mistress refused to talk to Grover, as did several cops on the force who did the usual "circle the wagons," protecting a fellow cop from accusations.
- During the gun battle, Suspicious Minds, another Presley hit, is heard in the background (not in a version sung by Elvis).
- At the bar, McGarrett orders a Longboard, lager made by the Kona Brewing Company. So do Kono and Danno. Grover gets a strawberry daiquiri.
- Adrian Ivanovich’s date of birth is July 8, 1981. He is 214 cm tall and weighs 98 kg.
- Peter Dobson, who played Elvis imitator Collins, also played the young Elvis in Forrest Gump.
The premise of this show is three around-40-year-old accountants from Cleveland -- Jake Lockhard (Pauly Shore), Mickey Dickson (Kevin Farley) and Nolan Fremont (Jaleel White) -- travel to Hawaii during spring break to try and make out with partying women, many of whom are young enough to be their daughters. The results are predictable, similar to a recent Facebook/YouTube video where some guy, as part of a "social experiment," asks women on the street if they would have sex with him. In the video most of the women are either horrified or just laugh at the guy asking (though he is younger than the three on the show). Same thing for this episode.
The three men are pretending to go to Hawaii to hunt wild boars. In order to do this, they have to transport rifles, and presumably ammuntion, on the planes. This is not particularly easy according to various TSA regulations, and whether this would even be encouraged by the wild game outfits, who would typically supply the hunters with firearms or even crossbows, is a good question. This hunting ruse does not convince one of the men's wives, who leaves him voice mail, calling him a "hairless, ball-less loser."
Speaking of questions, there are plenty of them about this show:
- When the men wake up on the morning after a day and night of wild partying with a huge hangover (comparisons with the hit movie of the same name are inevitable), they find a woman, later identified as Rebecca Oleana, dead in their bathtub. Strangely, none of them noticed this if they went to the bathroom, though presumably the ketamine (date rape drug) later determined by Max to be in their systems scrambled their brains enough to make them avoid seeing her, because not only is Oleana very dead with a bullet in her head, but the tub is full of bloody water and beer bottles.
- Why is ketamine in their systems? Someone obviously slipped this into their drinks, maybe because they were making total fools of themselves at the bars they went to, so someone wanted to get them out of the way or in trouble. Is the bullet in Rebecca's head from one of the men's rifles? Is this ever determined? (I don't think so, see below.)
- One of the accountants gave Rebecca his hotel room key card. In a huge Perry Mason-like plot twist, it is revealed (big spoiler) she was being sought by her terminally ill father who had her during an affair years ago. Rebecca was in line to get half of his $20 million fortune, but her step-brother Raymond Garvey (Todd Robert Anderson), upset that this money, all originally intended for him, would be split with her, was the one who killed her, after chasing her from the Glitter Ball Pit where she worked to the hotel where the accountants' room was located. But was this hotel located right next to the nightclub? The men are staying in room 1710 and Rebecca is shown running down the 17th floor hall with her step-brother right behind her. How could he get there so quickly? By taking another elevator to this floor? If so, how would he know which floor she was going to? Surely he was not in the same elevator as her! After the two of them go into the hotel room, there is the sound of a gunshot almost immediately, suggesting that one of the boar-hunting rifles used by the three accountants was used as the murder weapon. But then you have to ask -- how would he know that there was a weapon there, where it was located, and how could he get it loaded so quickly (presumably it was not)?
- In an unusual move, Garvey asks to be read his rights big time when in the blue-lit room, but, as usual, crumbles almost immediately when confronted with the fact that his step-sister fought back and there are likely traces of his DNA under her fingernails, saying "That money was mine." But has it been proved that he actually killed her? A smart lawyer could make mincemeat of this case if the guy had just kept his trap shut!
- How do the three men from Cleveland get Rebecca's dead body from the hotel bathtub to what they think is some out-of-the-way location where they intend to bury her (actually Diamond Head crater), later resulting in a charge of "hindering prosecution"?
Considering comedian Shore is synonymous with "lame" in certain circles, there was apprehension in some Internet forums about how he would fare on the show, but his performance wasn't bad. On the other hand, Farley overacted, channelling his late brother Chris, especially the scene where he leapt into the ball pit. White's character, the least "comedic" of the trio, was the most rational and sober.
The episode's obligatory sub-plot was dumb. Using a motorcycle, Jerry is delivering food for Kamekona when he notices a woman, later identified via a computerized Identikit as Natalie Morris, being abducted on the street. It turns out that she was grabbed by her criminal business partner named William Malo who she later shoots dead. Morris and Malo are involved in some slave-trafficking operation, where people are lured to Hawaii from other countries and then forced to pick coffee on some plantation (seriously).
Kono and Chin Ho go to the Big Island to investigate this, and deal with it without any help whatsoever from the local cops or anyone else from Five-0. They manage to take out the armed people who are guarding the operation without any problems (there are only two of them) and then drive quickly to the island's Kawaihae Harbor docks where they engage in a firefight with Morris who jumps on to a pallet of coffee being loaded on to a ship. She is shot dead, just like one of the guards at the plantation, and falls into the water. So once again, Five-0 eliminates suspects in a major crime, and this slave-trade crime was a big deal, because the woman and her partner were both wanted by the FBI and featured on "Fugitive Profiles," an "America's Most Wanted"-type TV show.
MORE TRIVIA:
- The police chief giving Jerry an award at the end of the show for his help which led to the capture of the two bad guys is the real current Honolulu police chief, Louis M. Kealoha.
- What is Kakemona referring to by "grinds," meaning the food that Jerry is delivering? Jerry is using the Siri-like Micrsoft Cortana on his cel phone to help him locate the address he has to take the food to.
- During McGarrett and Danno's investigation at one of the spring break party venues, a young woman frolicking in the pool with dozens of other people has her bikini top removed (this is only seen from the back, naturally).
- The three are thrown out of The Fix, a real Honolulu nightclub.
- The letter for Rebecca from estate attorneys Longworth and Motto concerning her parentage, dated April 10, 2015, has her address as 3340 Hukui Ave., #102, Honolulu 96826.
In this show, Kono goes on a symbolic outrigger voyage to complete something her mother wanted to do before she was stricken by an aneurysm. This part of the show was very good, and featured Grace Park's most dramatic performance of the entire series so far, despite the fact it had little to do with Five-0, other than the heavy "ohana" angle.
All the major characters for the show assembled on the beach at the beginning to wish Kono well, including her mother (Catherine Haena Kim), pushed across the sand in a wheelchair by her father (Ken Narasaki). Kono's mother was seen with her in numerous flashbacks to her childhood, where she was played by Miya Cech and her mother seemingly taught Kono everything she knew about surfing.
Of course, on Kono's journey, things go horribly wrong. The weather takes a change for the worse, and Kono ends up in more peril than any human being can possibly endure. First she loses her outrigger, then she has to stay on her surfboard despite a deluge straight out of The Perfect Storm. Chin Ho is constantly freaking out about Kono, despite having to work on the crime of the week.
That part of the show, unfortunately, was not particularly interesting.
The most recent of several drugstore robberies has resulted in the death of a pharmacist. What was stolen were decongestants containing pseudoephedrine to be used in the manufacture of meth.
Reviewing security footage, Chin Ho recognizes the tattoo of Makai Akana (Philip Moon), a meth cook who Chin sent to prison some time before. Five-0 goes to Akana's house, but his son Carter (Jordan Rodrigues) doesn't know where his father is and doesn't want to know.
With no explanation as to how they track Akana down, Five-0 locates him in the middle of nowhere, specifically the Kawaiunui Marsh, described by Wikipedia as "the largest wetlands in the Hawaiian Islands." There Akana is producing meth, but when arrested, he says that he is being forced to do this by a guy named Willie Moon who is threatening to kill his son. But when they return to this location to pick up Moon, after busting him, it turns out that the big brains behind the robberies was none other than Carter, who said that his father "owed him" for ruining his life.
Seriously, this show would have been a lot better if the Kono story had taken up the whole hour.
MORE TRIVIA:
- Kono's parents' grey hair was not particularly convincing at the beginning of the show. No doubt much of the budget was spent on the very impressive special effects and/or CGI for the storm scenes. But where did they do the "tank" sequences? Is there such a facility in Hawaii, sort of like those huge tanks they used to have to film pirate movies in Hollywood in the 1940s? (SurfBelle2 via Twitter reports there is filming of this scene on Facebook (Facebook login not required to view).
- Willie Moon's driver's license was #423Y872, he is 5'10", 170 pounds, and was born 03/04/1991. His address is 762 Pumua Street, Honolulu 96816.
- When Kono's satellite phone gets waterlogged, she uses the same technique as Chin Ho in an earlier episode (S01E12, actually), putting it in a bag of rice to dry it out.
- Each section of the show was prefaced by some Hawaiian saying or proverb, including a quote from legendary surfer Duke Kahanamoku.
- Hopefully the fish that Kono kills and eats was already dead, otherwise the SPCA will be bitchin'.
- When Five-0 visits Akana's house, finding his son Carter, McGarrett and some other cops go inside behind Carter, who turns and yells "Thank you for violating my civil rights." Chin Ho, apologizes, saying "We're sorry about that," a first for the show, if I am not mistaken.
- The drugstore where the pharmacist is killed at the beginning of the show, Waipahu Drug, is a real location at 94-748 Hikimoe St # A, Waipahu 96797.
This show, first of a double-header for the season finale, began with another two-part "previously on Five-0."
The first of these flashed back to seasons one and two with scenes between Danno and his ex-wife Rachel (Claire van der Boom) who reappeared in this episode. We find out later that Charlie, the baby boy that Rachel had delivered in or around S02E14 is not Stan's child at all, but Danno's. Rachel didn't want Danno to know this because she didn't want two kids to potentially grow up without a father in the event something happened to Danno.
This all pisses Danno off immensely, who describes what Rachel has done as "unforgiveable" because he has been deprived of the kid's presence for three years. This results in some high-powered emoting between Danno and Rachel, as well Danno and McGarrett, who gives his partner some advice about putting his anger aside, telling Danno that "parents shouldn't fight."
It turns out that Charlie is suffering from HLH (full name: hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis), a life-threatening condition where cells of the immune system don’t work properly to destroy infected or damaged cells as they should. One of the treatments for this condition involves a bone-marrow transplant, which is where Danno comes in.
The second flashback was to Chin Ho receiving the pictures of Adam and some mysterious Asian guy left for him by Gabriel in S05E21. This segued into the present, with Chin Ho being dropped off on Sand Island by a couple of Japanese-speaking dudes, who tell him to keep a hood on his head until he has counted to twenty (does Chin speak Japanese?).
Although Chin already showed the photos to McGarrett in a previous episode, Chin then goes to McGarrett's house and reveals some "intel" that he got about the pictures, presumably from these Japanese guys: namely, that the older man in the photos with Adam is Goro Shioma, a Tokyo financier who helped bankroll Adam's deceased (really now-deceased, I think) father Hiro. Shioma is also an oyabun (big shot) of a major yakuza organization.
How this was all explained to Chin Ho is not made clear. I don't know why Chin didn't just run the pictures of Shioma through Five-0's Supercomputer facial recognition program, since it seems to be able to figure who just about anyone in the world is.
Then we jump to the crime of the week.
An HPD cop stops some guy (actually a bounty hunter named Greg Farmer (Matt Lasky)) in the middle of nowhere because his car's tail light is malfunctioning. The cop wants to look in the trunk to see if there's a loose wire (is he just using this as an excuse?), which freaks out Farmer. Later we see what happened thanks to the cop's dashboard cam which has the same date as that of the show -- May 8, 2015: the cop opened the trunk and extracted another guy from there, who is Andrew Pelham (Robert Curtis Brown), alias David Sutter, an ex-cop wanted on the mainland for brutal homicides involving torture a couple of years before.
Five-0 tracks Sutter down to an apartment at 2026 Anakole Place in Pearl City (ZIP 96782) thanks to some asphalt residue from both Pelham's and Farmer's shoes (turns out that a city works crew was repairing the street in front of Pelham's house the light before -- sheesh). Of course, when they arrive, Pelham is not there, but another bounty hunter, the bearded Richie Malloy is, also searching for Pelham, who has a $40,000 reward on his head.
After some initial misunderstandings which result in Malloy being handcuffed, Malloy is let go, though I suspected that this was not the last we would see of him. And it turns out that later, after Five-0 tracks Pelham down to an apartment when he tries to use another one of his aliases to buy an airline ticket out of the country, Malloy shows up, thanks to a cel phone he taped to the underside of McGarrett's car (which he could follow with the GPS). Malloy shoots Pelham in what looks like a pretty serious manner with his shotgun and tucks the fugitive into his car. Malloy is after more than the $40,000 bounty, though. His financial records reveal that $300,000 has been put into his bank account from Malcolm Leddy (Robert Curtis Brown), father of Jennifer, one of Pelham's victims.
Malloy has turned Pelham over to Leddy, who, using knowledge from his studies years before at medical school, prepares to give Pelham the same sadistic treatment given to Jennifer in the basement of a rented Oahu house.
The scenes that followed were, to be blunt, kind of a mess (no pun intended in advance).
Letty has Pelham shackled in the basement of the house hanging from the ceiling; Pelham's feet (which have no socks or shoes) are not tied up.
Letty removes one of Pelham's hands from the shackles and uses pliers to squeeze his finger, perhaps breaking it. Then Letty tries to cut off Pelham's scalp, but freaks out and, in frustration, pushes the table with all the knives and other torture implements so everything falls on the floor.
At this point, from one angle, it looks like there is nothing close to Pelham, though from another angle there might be something. I don't think it is the knife later shown in closeup, and, in any case, I think it is highly unlikely that Pelham can reach the knife.
In order to do this, he would have to s-t-r-e-t-c-h, grab the knife with his feet and then somehow get this knife into his free hand (which has a severely damaged finger), while hanging from the ceiling by one hand! He certainly could not reach the knife on the floor with just his hand while hanging from the ceiling.
Assuming he does all this, Pelham gets the knife and cuts off his own thumb to escape from the shackles, then attacks and seriously injures Letty, and then somehow manages to stick his hand (without a thumb) back through the shackles to look like he was hanging from the ceiling!
At one point, Letty starts to go upstairs, either to -- as Pelham mockingly says -- call the cops, or just to cool off. At this point, you cannot see a knife on the floor in front of Pelham at all.
After McGarrett comes downstairs, he finds the father on the floor, with Pelham's cut-off thumb under him.
Whether the attack on Letty happened upstairs or downstairs is a good question, because when Five-0 shows up at the house, a lot of stuff on the main floor is broken. But then why would Pelham cut off his thumb, come upstairs and attack Letty, and not just leave the house right then, instead dragging the father's body downstairs and stringing himself up in the shackles again? The upstairs scenario also makes you wonder why the thumb was under Letty downstairs (so does the downstairs scenario, actually).
Once again, there is some critical scene in a show where everything after depends on it, and it goes off the rails at that point (up to then, the show was quasi-passable). Just a bit of care with the continuity, like showing how Pelham got the knife to cut off his thumb, etc., and it would have made much more sense ... well, maybe.
MORE TRIVIA:
- There is a big goof in the sequence near the beginning of the show where the cop encounters the bounty hunter Farmer.
These are the times from the dashboard cam in the cop's car:
2:08:32 - The bounty hunter's car is stopped
2:08:36 - Cop approaches car from the rear
2:08:41 - Cop opens the trunk
2:08:51 - Bad guy comes out of trunk, punches cop
2:08:53 - Bad guy grabs cop's gun, shoots him
2:09:04 - Bad guy shoots bounty hunter, who is handcuffed to steering wheel
2:09:06 - Bad guy pulls bounty hunter out of car, seemingly without removing handcuff
2:09:21 - Bad guy leaves in the car
If you watch the sequence where the cop approaches the car and talks to the bounty hunter about the tail light, there is around ONE MINUTE of conversation. In the dashboard cam footage, there are only 5 SECONDS from the time the cop approaches the car until he opens the trunk.
There is no explanation as to how the handcuffs are removed.- At the beginning of the show, Chin tells McGarrett that Kono is getting married to Adam in three days. When later asked by Danno if he is bringing a date to the wedding like his prosecutor friend Ellie, McGarrett starts waffling, saying he is "not ready to jump into something with somebody else."
- Charlie is supposedly three years old, but looks older. A friend of mine has a four-year-old daughter who looks younger than Charlie!
- At the beginning, as Farmer is driving, he is listening to Jackson Browne's "Running on Empty." The license number of Farmer's car is TY8 814, which cannot be traced by Five-0 at the scene of the pullover, which is weird, because it looks like a real plate.
- Malloy's New York driver's license #548 968 14L shows his address as 264 Sandra Drive, Buffalo, NY 14229. His date of birth is 04-10-71, and the license was issued on 4-10-14.
- When tracking down Pelham, Grover uses computer data bases to find out that Pelham paid cash for six months rent in advance on his Pearl City apartment. Why would this very nosy information be available in a computer at all, or is this information that Grover entered into the computer after he found this out from Pelham's landlord?
- In a scene full of boring expository dialogue, Kono and Chin Ho track down the car that Pelham stole from Farmer, which has been torched and abandoned at the Ke'ehi Lagoon. This location has no camera surveillance of any kind. They surmise that Pelham sucked gas out of the car into a plastic container using a rubber hose and then set the car on fire. One wonders why he would bother to commit such an elaborate cover-up, risking his own health like this.
- Danno hears from Rachel when he and McGarrett are at Pelham's home, and McGarrett tells Danno to drop everything to go and see her. But they only have the one car!
- Chin Ho watches a crimestoppers-type video made around the time of Jennifer's murder from TV station WNKW, which has a tip line of 555-0144.
- Dog the Bounty Hunter makes a short appearance when McGarrett and Danno need some "professional advice" on how a bounty hunter would get someone off the island under the radar. Dog uses some peculiar expression, saying "So this is on the DL, right?" presumably meaning this is "off the record." Dog tells them that a local cargo airline, Trans Air, will do this kind of transaction for cash with no questions asked.
- The $300,000 that Molloy receives from Leddy goes to his bank account #363516847-326, transaction ID D-36705.
- Bad word alert -- McGarrett on the phone to Leddy: "We've got enough evidence to put this bastard [Pelham] away."
- As they are in bed at the beginning of the show, Danno's girl friend Melissa, formerly Amber, asks if they can have macadamia nut pancakes at the Wailana Coffee House, an actual Honolulu restaurant.
- A search of Pelham's house finds seven bogus drivers' licenses, including Arizona: Jacob Heyman, 3013 E. Sheena Dr., Phoenix, AZ 85022; Wisconsin: Daniel Lack, 4160 County Road M, Madison, WI 53719; Wyoming: Brad Voight; Missouri: Tommy Lukas; and Nevada: Paul Vickars, 2704 Swenson St., Las Vegas, NV 89109. He uses the alias of Jeremy Gehring to book a flight on Paxana Airlines, ticket number 28389303091, flight no. PWA 22, seat 248, Y/Conf class, departing 7:15 PM from Honolulu on May 8, 2015 and arriving at 2:22 PM at Wattay International Airport, Vientiane, Laos.
This episode, final one of the season, starts on US Route 83 near Garrison, North Dakota (though we know it is really not). Route 83, according to Wikipedia, is one of the longest north-south highways in the USA. An "Unmarked Military Transport" is travelling down this highway. There are two trucks followed by a larger truck which looks sort of like a UPS van, which in turn is followed by another two trucks. In the middle truck (I guess) are six W80 nuclear warheads. Good old Wikipedia describes the W80s as "a small thermonuclear warhead (fusion or, more descriptively, two-stage weapon) in the enduring stockpile with a variable yield of between 5 and 150 kt of TNT." The part about "5 and 150 kt of TNT" is mentioned specifically in the show along with a bunch of other shit. (Hey, do you think the writers are cribbing from Wikipedia?)
Two other military-like trucks pass this transport. Now you would think that because the transport is "unmarked" and "secret" and stuff like that, it might consider these other trucks to be suspicious, but no one bats an eyelash. These other two trucks drive real fast ahead of the transport and position themselves on opposite sides of the road and between these two trucks is strung some REALLY strong wire, which looks like a garrote. ("Garrote" is found on Wikipedia, in case you do not know what it is.)
The mechanics of all this escapes me, but what happens is, the transport, at least the first truck, drives into this wire, which slices right through the truck like a knife through butter. From what we learn later in the show, it sounds like it sliced through all five trucks of the transport, though this is hard to believe. Surely the people in the third or fourth or fifth truck would have figured out what was going on and stopped before this happened. And wasn't there a risk that the wire might have sliced through the nuclear weapons along with the trucks and the people inside? And wouldn't the trucks the wire is strung between have to be REALLY strong (and heavy) in order to pull off this manoeuvre? Questions, questions...
A bunch of guys connected with the garotting trucks, right-wing patriot crackpots led by Josh Bennett (Jeffrey Nordling), a guy who Chin Ho later describes as a "nut job," because he was not allowed to be in the US military thanks to his borderline personality disorder, grab just one of the six nukes and high tail it to Fischer Pvt (which means "private," I guess) Airport in Garrison (this is a real place, according to you-know-what).
Bennett and his pals are supposed to board a plane there, but, according to one of their members, a guy with a real short haircut (Matthew Webb), "We have a situation," military talk for "something is fucked up." The plane they were expecting to use isn't coming because of "mechanical problems." But nearby they see this other plane, a G-5 plane (meaning Gulfstream V, a business jet aircraft, blah blah blah, according to WKP), and commandeer it, telling its pilot "We're going to Hawaii."
In due course, this plane arrives in Hawaii at John Rodgers Field in Kalaeloa (this is really the name of Kalaeloa Airport, that's what WKP tells us). The pilot is dead, and within a few minutes, Grover is freaking out because the Department of Defense tells him about how nukes were stolen near Garrison, though there is no direct connection made with this plane until some guys from the HPD bomb squad with geiger counters go through the plane and determine that yes, there is residual radiation, likely from the nukes, on the plane. McGarrett looks towards the plane, and stunned, says "They're here," a line reminiscent of the classic 1950's film Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Now Kono is getting married REAL soon to Adam. Earlier, Chin Ho had a big confrontation with Adam over the pictures of Adam taken with Japanese yakuza boss Goro Shioma (see review of the last show), but Adam told Chin that "it's not what you think," and that he had travelled to Japan to try and break ties with Shioma, who had put up the original money for his (Adam's) late father's businesses in Hawaii. Shioma said no dice, he wants Adam to return to the same state his father was when he started, i.e., with no material possessions. Adam says that is cool with him, because Kono is not a material girl. Chin accepts this.
Kono shows up at the airfield with Chin, ready to put in a day's work, though McGarrett says she ought to be getting ready for her wedding. In an example of the utterly brainless dialogue the writers have given her throughout the show, when told that the bad guys only brought one of six nukes along, she says "Oh, well, there's some good news. Only one to worry about." Seriously, Kono, you should have stayed home reading Modern Bride!
I forgot to mention that Catherine, McGarrett's girl friend, has returned. We last saw her in S04E21, when she rode off into the sunset in Afghanistan to help some old friends find their son who was kidnapped by the Taliban. The return of both the character and the actress playing her, Michelle Borth, who was thought gone from the show forever, set off the usual shitstorm of people who don't like either the actress or her character in the usual fan forums. Not much happens between her and McGarrett, because he is always getting called away to work, though there are suggestions that she will be sticking around. I hope so, because Borth is a goddess and these haters can go you-know-what themselves (a word discussed in Wikipedia).
Catherine, though she has left the Navy completely, still has "intel" connections, who tell her that it is likely that Bennett is on Oahu to barter a deal with Sameer Hadad, an Al-Qaeda lieutenant who has shown a propensity for buying nuclear weapons, and there may be some connection with "a local shipping company." Five-0 quickly arrives at the docks and manages to find a container among thousands there where Hadad has set up his headquarters. After a firefight, some guy who is Hadad's pal spills the beans as to where Bennett can be located, and upon arriving at this location (an auto wrecker's), another firefight erupts. McGarrett pursues Bennett over a bunch of cars to be scrapped, during which Bennett turns and fires directly at McGarrett but, of course, does not hit him. But when McGarrett shoots back, Bennett is hit in the leg and falls through a car window and is captured.
Taken to the blue-lit room, which we learn from McGarrett during his interrogation is 60 feet underground and a four-foot-thick cinder block box ("so no one can hear you scream," I suppose), Bennett, described as a nine-to-five hardware store manager from Coshocton, Ohio (a real town!), does not break down, even after McGarrett shoots him in the leg (the same leg as was hit before, see below for further discussion about this). As to why Bennett was motivated to do this terrible deed (we're talking nuclear annihilation), he tells McGarrett that after 9/11, he was disgusted by how the government mollycoddled terrorists, and by appearing to sell the nuke to Hadad, he will make him into a scapegoat so that a war will erupt and they will soon be dropping bombs all over the Middle East, reducing it to a parking lot.
But all this is not true, because Hadad is found washed up on the beach soon after, and Max determines that he was killed BEFORE Bennett was taken into custody. In other words, Bennett is still the big boss of the plan which will transform Waikiki into what looks like the bottom of a Shake and Bake bag.
Kono, still not thinking too hard about her nuptials, tells the others that she has been reading Bennett's computer files forwarded by the DOD, and there is a reference in there to the Waikiki Trolley. A nuclear-sized light bulb comes on in her head, and -- YES! -- she has the solution to WHERE IS THE STOLEN NUKE. Five-0 rushes to find a trolley whose driver was found dead that very morning, including Catherine, who is still driving the blue Corvette she was seen using when she was last on the show. She also is carrying a gun and her car has a flashing blue light.
Pulling the trolley over near the beach, McGarrett shoots the driver -- who just happens to be Mr. Short Haircut from the Fischer Private Airport -- dead. BUT ... there is still a big problem with the nuke, which is going to go off in about two hours and THERE IS NO WAY TO DISARM IT because its Permissive Action Link has been disabled. According to Los Alamos National Lab, this is very bad, because the maximum damage this bomb can cause will encompass a radius of 2.9 miles, with utter destruction within 1 mile, and possibly 100,000 people dead.
There is no time to deliver this bomb to a military base for disposal (so to speak), so McGarrett and Danno, dressed in their wedding duds, commandeer Kamekona's helicopter to fly the bomb out to sea where Los Alamos says that if it's dropped fifty miles off the coast to a depth of 2,000 feet, everything will be peachy. Considering they are using a Eurocopter AS-350BA Ecureuils which has a top speed of 150 miles an hour (info supplied by you-know-what and Google), and there are 22 minutes left on the LED clock on the nuke, this means they can take it out 50 miles and still have a recommended 2 minutes left to get the hell out of the way of the blast (though this does not take into consideration turning around). This procedure will "neutralize the radiation."
Despite having a very agitated "helicopter-gument" as they approach the drop point, Danno throws the nuke out of the copter with 1:58 remaining and it's in the water at 1:51. The massive explosion which results as the boys are on their way back to Oahu strikes me that it could potentially knock the helicopter out of the sky with a shock wave, but what do I know ... I can't find anything about this on Wikipedia, so I'm sure the writers did all the proper research.
Kono is still not at her wedding at the Royal Hawaiian Golf Club in Kailua, though a lot of other people are, and have seemingly been there for a REALLY LONG TIME. She is standing at the beach watching the nuclear cloud, anxiously holding hands with Catherine as she thinks of her boss (McGarrett) and Catherine thinks of her boyfriend (McGarrett). Kono is wearing a cami top with her bra straps showing and jeans.
After McGarrett and Danno implausibly return OK, Kono manages to get to the golf club and changed into her wedding gown (something that would normally take HOURS) in a very short space of time with her hair already dolled up, despite having run around with it that way at work. Even Kamekona, who was bitching to McGarrett that the explosion would wipe out stocks of shrimp for three months (I dunno where this figure comes from, but I can guess...), manages to arrive at the wedding before the others.
But there is a big complication ... Chin Ho has forgotten the wedding rings in his car. When he goes to get them, who should appear but Gabriel, his brother-in-law (suspected earlier on in the show of murdering some "business rival" the day before). Gabe points a gun at Chin's head and offers to play Monty Hall, i.e., "Let's Make a Deal," with Chin taking half of his profits from his various criminal enterprises in exchange for staying off Gabe's back. Chin tells him to take a hike, and it looks like Chin is going to get a bullet in his back , when Gabriel disappears in an instant, just like he arrived in the parking lot.
And at the end of the show ... KONO IS STILL NOT MARRIED!
MORE TRIVIA:
- In the auto scrap yard, McGarrett shoots Bennett, and blood is seen on his pant leg. But when Bennett falls off the car, you don't see anything: picture one; picture 2. Later, in the blue-lit room, it looks like there is a pool of blood beside Bennett's left leg (this is the leg that McGarrett later shoots), but there is no damage to his pants.
- The way the trolley comes to a park by the beach and everyone runs away in a panic brought to mind the old show's episode Anybody Can Build a Bomb, about the pursuit of a nuclear device which also takes place in a beachfront park where they detonate the bomb in a public washroom!
- Danno calls McGarrett "Dr. Strangelove" twice, suggesting he is a nuclear war expert like the character in the classic Stanley Kubrick film.
- During the pursuit of the trolley, Grover refers to the intersection of Kalia Road and Saratoga Road, an actual location.
- Kono and Catherine -- as well as a lot of people on the beach -- can see the nuclear cloud in the distance, but after McGarrett and Danno return in the helicopter, this cloud has disappeared.
- The grey makeup for Kono's mother's hair at the wedding is even worse than it was in the Kono-lost-at-sea show two episodes ago.
- Bennett's Class D Ohio driver's license #D3304281B shows he lives at 528 Magnolia Street, Coshocton 43812. His date of birth is 08-26-85, he is 5'11" and weighs 190 pounds. The DL was issued 08-26-2001, and expires on 08-26-85, which is the same as Bennett's birthdate.
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