Hawaii Five-O (1968-80) — Season 12 Episode Reviews

INCLUDING ODDITIES, GOOFS AND TRIVIA

Copyright ©1994-2023 by Mike Quigley. No reproduction of any kind without permission.


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RETURN TO THE SITE'S MAIN PAGECOMPREHENSIVE INDEX


SEASON TWELVE (1979-1980) - QUICK INDEX

The numbering system below uses Season/Episode numbers, i.e., S01E01 = Season One, Episode One. It also includes the numbering system found in Karen Rhodes' Booking Hawaii Five-O. These are the numbers in (parentheses).

S12E01 (260) - A Lion In The Streets (Paul L. Smith, Harry Guardino, Barbara Luna, Ross Martin)
S12E02 (261) - Who Says Cops Don't Cry (Alan Fudge, Darrell Fetty)
S12E03 (262) - Though The Heavens Fall (Robert Reed, Elyssa Davalos, Michael Strong, Dennis Patrick)
S12E04 (263) - Sign Of The Ram (Jayne Meadows, Antony Ponzini, Eddie Firestone)
S12E05 (264) - Good Help Is Hard To Find (John P. Ryan, Jason Evers, Ross Martin)
S12E06 (265) - Image Of Fear (Linda Marsh, Katy Kurtzman, Guy Boyd, Soon-Tek Oh)
S12E07 (266) - Use A Gun, Go To Hell (Andrew Duggan, Richard Dmitri, Jack Stauffer, Paul Koslo)
S12E08 (267) - Voice Of Terror (Cal Bellini, Kaz Garas, Mary Angela)
S12E09 (268) - A Shallow Grave (John David Carson, John Ireland)
S12E10 (269) - The Kahuna (Cathy Lee Crosby, Don Knight)
S12E11 (270) - Labyrinth (James Olson, Lyle Bettger, Ted Hamilton, Tricia O'Neil)
S12E12 (271) - School For Assassins (Monte Markham, Lloyd Bochner, Pamela Susan Shoop, Gary Lockwood)
S12E13 (272) - For Old Times Sake (Peter Bromilow, Neva Patterson, Bob Hoy)
S12E14 (273) - The Golden Noose (Ed Lauter, Irene Yah Ling Sun)
S12E15 (274) - The Flight Of The Jewels (Jeff Daniels, Linwood Boomer)
S12E16 (275) - Clash Of Shadows (Albert Paulsen, Elaine Giftos, George Ralph DiCenzo, Lloyd Bochner)
S12E17 (276) - A Bird In Hand... (John Dehner, Lara Parker)
S12E18 (277) - The Moroville Covenant (Paul Burke, Helen Funai, Diane McBain)
S12E19 (278) - Woe To Wo Fat (Khigh Dhiegh, Lyle Bettger, Vito Scotti, Pat Crowley)

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RATINGS:
★★★★ = One of the very best episodes, a must-see.
★★★ = Better than average, worthy of attention.
★★ = Average, perhaps with a few moments of interest.
= Below average, a show to avoid.
(For another look at Season Twelve by Bobbi Baker, click here. ** NEW! **

260. (S12E01) A Lion In The Streets ★★★

Original air date: 10/4/79 — Opening CreditsEnd Credits
Director: Reza Badiyi; Producer: Andrew Gottlieb (Hollywood); Writer: Robert Janes; Music: Morton Stevens
Timings: Teaser: 0:32; Main Titles: 0:58; Act One: 14:01; Act Two: 12:26; Act Three: 10:36; Act Four: 13:06; Act Five: 22:44; Act Six: 9:26; Act Seven: 13:50; End Credits: 0:39; Total Time: 1:38:38.

QUICK PLOT:

McGarrett finds himself having to deal with a curse placed on him by a kahuna while caught in the crossfire as Hawaiian union workers take on the Islands' underworld.

Click here to read Full Plot. Thanks to Bobbi for her help with the plots in this season!

REVIEW:

This is a very Hawaiian episode. It contains elements of Hawaiian nationalism, Hawaiian religion and superstition, Hawaiian crime (the Mafia-like kumu), Hawaiian unions, as well as the Hawaiian hotel and tourist industries. The show begins with a gorgeous Hawaiian sunset. Perhaps one should not be too "anal"-ytical about this sunset, reading into it the fact that the show was on its last legs.

The show begins with Sam Limahelu (Ed Fernandez) being beaten by thugs connected with Johnny Mio (Harry Guardino), a professional union man from the mainland who is running for the same position – business agent — as Sam in the upcoming United Resort Workers elections. From the Boston area, Mio has connections to organized crime in his past. Why these Hawaiian goons are supporting Mio is a good question. The union board also nominates Mio to fill the position of the current business agent, who recently resigned, until the election is held.

None of this goes over well with Andy Kamoku (Paul L. Smith, whose most famous acting jobs were as the sadistic prison guard Hamidou in Midnight Express and Bluto in Robert Altman's Popeye). Kamoku, a descendant of King Kamehameha, is a member of the union, though his exact job at one of the local hotels is never established. Andy confronts Mio, who is addressing a crowd of workers at the union hall: "He worked for the textile factories in New England. Who was behind him then? Was it the New England mob? Are they behind him now? … Any of you ever heard of a haole coming 6,000 miles just to help out a bunch of poor old dishwashers and busboys? Well, neither have I, unless there was something in it for him, of course."

Kamoku wants McGarrett to bust Mio for the attack on Sam, giving him a lot of static when McGarrett tells him that he can't do this without any hard evidence. Andy tells him, "I'm a firm believer in the lessons of history, and history teaches us that the law is haole law. McGarrett replies, "Don't think for one moment that anyone's race or color makes any difference to me, my friend ... No one wants to see your union stay yours more than I do."

Deprived of Danno, not to mention Chin Ho (deceased as of the end of season ten), McGarrett enlists the help of Moe ("Truck") Kealoha, an HPD cop, to go undercover in the union. This seems like a dumb move, almost as dumb as the operation which got Chin killed, because Truck admits that he is well known to local restaurant owners for his gluttonous appetite. Still, we see Truck, who presumably just joined the union, standing on the perimeter of meetings.

Kamoku persuades his uncle Benny (William Valentine), who founded the union, to run for business agent, but the same goons that took care of Sam break Benny's hands. Meanwhile, Mio meets with local kumu boss Tony Alika, who has returned to his beachfront mansion after having had his sentence for first degree murder overturned on technicalities and has been released on $100,000 bail. Mio tells Alika that Kamoku means trouble, but Tony brushes this off, saying "Ain't no big thing." McGarrett meets with the Governor, expressing his concerns that Mio is being backed by Alika, who "already has a stronghold on most of the restaurant supply business: booze, linen, vending machines."

Truck notices someone hanging around Mio. He does a background check on this guy and finds out he is James Carew (William Smith), a former cop from Boston, who was a lieutenant of detectives assigned to the organized crime detail. He was making real progress with the Marioni mob family and had a good case against three of them for labor racketeering. Then they murdered his wife and child. After that, Carew cornered one of the three in a syndicate betting parlor, provoked a fight, and with his bare hands, put the guy in the hospital for six months. He was cleared by Boston P.D.'s internal affairs, but he had to resign from the force. The second Marioni took a fall to keep out of Carew's way, and is now doing three to five. The third one, Guido, disappeared. So McGarrett speculates that Carew is looking for number three: "If Mio is tied in with the syndicate, it's possible he knows where Marioni is hiding."

Carew is hauled into McGarrett's office by Truck who observed Carew almost run over Mio in a hotel parking garage with his car in a scene reminiscent of season eleven's "The Sleeper." When McGarrett tells Carew, "I know what happened to your wife and child. I sympathize with you. When something like that happens to another human being, we all feel it, but no matter how much you hurt, there's no excuse for starting a personal vendetta here in Honolulu," Carew tells him, "I want a sermon, I go see a priest." McGarrett tells Carew he has "a big mouth and bad judgment," but Carew will not listen. As he leaves the office, he tells McGarrett, "I feel that maybe you and I weren't meant to be buddies after all."

The goons backing Mio stoop low when they kidnap Kamoku's son Andy Junior (Jahan Byrne) and take him for a ride, producing some anxious moments. He is found by Truck who brings him home. In front of Andy, Andy's wife Elena (Barbara Luna) and several of Andy's supporters, Truck tells McGarrett, who is also there, that he located the kid "out by Sea Life Park, … walking along the highway," making it pretty obvious that Truck works for Five-O.

Kamoku again wants McGarrett to bust Mio, but McGarrett gives him another speech, blabbing in front of everyone that "Mio is behind this and Alika is behind Mio," which seems like a surprising comment to make. Having already said that Andy's take-the-law-into-his-own-hands attitude was "macho nonsense," McGarrett challenges him to show up for the next step in Alika's hearing, saying "he goes back to prison and he's out of business for good."

Unfortunately, in court the judge (Colin de Silva) has a big surprise for everyone: "It is apparent that the learned judge in the lower court permitted certain errors of procedure … The testimony of the three witnesses should not have been admitted as evidence. It is therefore the decision of this court that a mistrial has occurred … The accused is entitled to a new trial at a date to be determined."

McGarrett is furious, but so is Andy, who goes to see a kahuna (Edward Larry Akau) and has a kapu (curse) placed on McGarrett. Duke tells McGarrett "This is the hardest thing I've ever had to do … You're taboo. No Hawaiian can help you. We're not even supposed to talk to you."

Both McGarrett and the Governor are incredulous at the curse, saying it is "something out of the dark ages." The Governor tells McGarrett, "Do whatever you have to do." McGarrett, in desperation, phones Alika who won't take his call and laughs at him, saying, "I'm just a poor Hawaiian boy who comes from a very traditional family and there's nothing more sacred than a kapu."

Andy goes on a spree of vengeance, finding the two guys who kidnapped his son, and forces them to confess. Then he raids places that are connected with Alika, like gambling dens and bookmaking parlors. All of these moves are very unhealthy for Andy, just like when McGarrett gave Victor Jovanko a lot of attitude in "Blood Money Is Hard To Wash." Andy tells Elena, who is very nervous, "No kumu, no Mafia, just us."

After hearing about McGarrett's dilemma, Carew comes to his office and wants to make a deal — immunity for Mio if he will reveal the location of Guido Marioni. McGarrett says that Carew is being exactly like Kamoku. When Carew says McGarrett should be more flexible – "You have to give a little, you have to take a little" — McGarrett replies, "Give and take as you call it is out of the question." Meanwhile, Alika is pissed by Andy's attacks on his criminal activities. He says he couldn't care less about Mio and the union; instead his venom is directed towards Kamoku: "This guy's challenging the kumu directly. I can't let him get away with that."

Alika arranges for a large quantity of marijuana to be placed in Andy's garage, and HPD alerted. After Andy is busted, he is brought to McGarrett's office, where he gets another speech: "I had you brought here in the hopes that maybe I could talk some sense into that hard head of yours. I know you've been set up, but Alika and his gang are experts at that. You can't fight them alone. Okay, be stupid, clam up, but I don't think you really care about the union and your people, just revenge." Still under the influence of the kapu, Andy says nothing.

McGarrett even quotes Shakespeare. (PUH-LEEZ!!!) "Heat not a furnace so hot that it doth singe yourself," adding, "Revenge is a cancer which left unchecked consumes both the vengeful and his foe. Think about it." Andy doesn't say anything. (The actual quote is "Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot / That it do singe yourself" from Henry VIII.)

McGarrett is thinking twice about assistance from Carew, and meets him on the Falls of Clyde ship near the Aloha Tower. He tells Carew that he feels "helpless," but says, "I don't especially like you, Carew. But I think you're probably a good cop in spite of yourself … Here's a list of all his [Alika's] addresses, phone numbers, license plates of all his cars, favorite restaurants, even his lady friends."

Shortly after this, Carew follows Alika on the beach where he is jogging accompanied by his manservant Billy Swan (Jerry Bowd). Swan is no muscle man bodyguard. Carew sneaks up behind Swan and cold-cocks him, then he starts pushing Alika into the surf, saying "I am not McGarrett. You and I are gonna have a whole different relationship … I want you to take a vacation and forget about the union election … The best thing for your health is you go take a long vacation." Alika hurries to McGarrett's office to complain, but the Five-O boss tells him, " You shouldn't be talking to me at all, Alika. Aren't you breaking the kapu?... I'm in enough trouble with the Hawaiian gods already, I shouldn't even be talking to you … You just go down to H.P.D., you ask for form 110, simple assault, or 120, aggravated assault. Now, get out of here before I report you to your kahuna."

Released on bail, Andy goes to a yacht on the harbor which contains a large shipment of marijuana, presumably with some connection to Alika. He and his friends take the pot and dump it into the harbor; an article in the newspaper the next day talks about the "Honolulu Tea Party." Carew offers to go and talk to Andy, who is running on adrenalin, telling his followers, "We've got him [Mio] on the defensive. The people are behind us, not them … We're gonna stick together. We'll watch out for one another. If we do that, we're invincible. The only way that Alika and Mio can win is if we quit and I don't know about the rest of you guys but I'm not quitting because I'm gonna finish what Alika started."

Carew shows up at Andy's place and makes an emotional speech, first calling the crowd assembled there "a bunch of Marshal Dillons." He goes on, "You ought to give McGarrett a chance … There are gonna be a whole bunch of innocent people that's gonna be hurt because of what you guys are doing. You and you and you and all of you … Look, I know Johnny Mio. I know him from Boston. He's nothing. But I'll tell you what I can do. I can put him with Tony Alika. [Carew was shadowing the two of them together recently at a jewelry store.] You guys say the word, I'll blow everything to the union. We bust both of them at once … I know things about Johnny Mio that aren't on any police reports." Even after Andy's friend Moki (Paul Martin) says they should all listen to Carew, Andy is ready to go out the door. Carew is exasperated, and can only say, "You guys are all a bunch of dummies, man."

Just then the phone rings, and Mio talks to Andy about getting together to "talk a deal." However, in a parking lot where the meeting has been arranged, some thugs show up and shoot at both Andy and Moki, with Moki being seriously injured and taken to the hospital.

Around this time, McGarrett goes to see Reverend Akea (Howard Kaohi), who "is respected by [his] people and by the kahunas." He tells Akea, "I'm sure that Andy Kamoku is a good man, Father, but he can't continue what he's doing without innocent people being hurt. Now, the Hawaiian people know me. I've always been on their side. I've done nothing nor would I do anything to hurt their cause. But I must get the kapu lifted if I'm going to stop Alika and the kumu." Amazingly, the kapu is lifted shortly after this meeting and Duke and Truck are back at work.

The two goons who failed to waste Andy wait for him to return home. They talk to Alika, who figures that Andy will go after Mio first because he set Andy up. But then Alika suggests that they should let Andy knock off Mio, to kill two birds with one stone: "This, uh, union thing isn't going the way I planned anyway. It could tie up all the loose ends and, uh, let the union take the heat … You make it look like Mio put up one hell of a fight then just like that, we rid of two problems at the same time, huh?"

Andy does return home, but over the protests of Elena, he leaves, even after she takes his gun away. Carew shows up and wants to know where Andy went. He gets emotional again, telling Andy's wife, in a rather lame speech, "Your husband's a great big beautiful dude, but they [the bad guys] don't play the same game. They're snakes, but they run around with big guns that go bang-bang and they kill people." She finally tells him that Andy went after Alika (not Mio) – but her husband never actually said this is where he was going! He is going there, followed by the two goons. When Andy gets to Alika's, he knocks out Billy Swan, putting his usefulness as a bodyguard again seriously in doubt. The goons, who seem to have left their guns in their car, follow Andy, and he takes care of them as well.

Sneaking in to Alika's massage room, Andy pretends to be Billy Swan, and threatens to snap Alika's neck like a chicken if he ever comes near his family again. McGarrett and Carew show up quickly. McGarrett goes into Speech Mode again: "Andy, listen to me, will you? We're a nation of laws, not men, not always perfect, but we keep trying. Now, I'm not gonna kid you, Alika may beat that charge again but sooner or later, he's gonna make that one... That one big mistake. They all do and I'll be waiting for him. Now, that I promise you."

Andy does stop and goes home to his family. Nothing happens with Alika, who is still going to have a new trial. Later, Truck reports that Andy took his name off the ballot and the union's mainland board decided to cancel the elections for six months. Truck returns to HPD, with McGarrett telling him, "I'd like you to work with us again." Nothing is mentioned about what happens to Andy as far as the marijuana and other potential charges are concerned. Nothing is mentioned about what happens to Mio either.

McGarrett later offers Carew a job, saying, "I think we can straighten you out maybe … in spite of your unorthodox methods." When Carew replies, "I don't think you and I were made for each other," McGarrett tells him, "I'm not asking you to marry me, for God's sake. I'm offering you an opportunity to work for Five-O." Carew, whose name becomes "Kimo," the Hawaiian equivalent for "James," doesn't join Five-O until the end of the next show, "Who Says Cops Don't Cry," even though McGarrett's original offer was only for 24 hours for Carew to make up his mind.

This show is kind of small-scale epic compared to some of the other two-hour shows, other than "The Grandstand Play." It is relatively logical with the exception of points mentioned above. The acting is pretty good, though Smith as Kamoku is kind of hyper, to put it mildly. Barbara Luna, who appeared in an earlier show with Harry Guardino, "A Thousand Pardons — You're Dead," though they don't share any scenes in this one, is also very good. She played a hooker in the earlier show, quite likely "doing it" with Danno. She has made the transition from a hot babe to a hot momma!

The music is by Morton Stevens who had his pick of the crop scoring the first show for every season other than the eleventh, as well as over fifty other episodes, including the pilot. Although this is the twelfth season, Stevens' work is above average and reminds us how good the music for the show could be, especially in comparison with most of the composers, including several one-offs, whose work appeared in not only this but the tenth and eleventh seasons as well.

Of course, the big question remaining is, why did William Smith get hired for the second banana job? Sharon Farrell had at least worked on the show three times previously: "A Capitol Crime," "A Short Walk On The Longshore," and "Why Won't Linda Die?" But Smith, who appeared in an episode of Stoney Burke which also starred Jack Lord, and in numerous cult-type movies as well as perhaps his most famous role Rich Man, Poor Man as the very nasty villain Falconetti, still seems a very odd choice.

According to Sharon Farrell's salacious autobiography, "Hollywood Princess" From Sioux City, Iowa, "Bill was trying to prove to the 'Hollywood Heavies' that his reputation for being difficult to work with was unfounded. Now he was here in Hawaii proving he could take anything thrown at him and not blow.

"Bill and I were both scared to death for our jobs every day. But I think Bill was even more scared of himself ... he wanted to knock Jack's block off. And it took all the will power he could muster to control himself. When Jack we yelling at me or other members of the cast or crew, and putting someone down, Bill's jaw muscles would clinch as tight as a vice. You could tell he was ready to blow. Any minute, one felt that Bill would take Jack out, and this muscular specimen could have easily done it.

"Jack was always asking for it. But somehow Bill managed to control his temper.

"From the first day of shooting we knew that Jack Lord wanted me and Bill Smith to take over the show. Jack had planned to retain the Executive Producer title and pay, but he was going off to develop a new show where he would be portraying a sea captain sailing out of the Hawaiian waters, of course." (I think she is referring to M Station Hawaii, which did not turn out exactly as described here.)

Smith is personable in "Lion In The Streets," occasionally cracking a smile. The scenes with Andy, Andy's followers and Andy's wife are a bit much, though, because Carew is trying to make a case for them to let McGarrett deal with things in his own way, which is diametrically opposed to the way Carew would deal with these same things using his "kick ass now and ask questions later" methods. This was actually the fourth episode filmed. The others were, in order, "Who Says Cops Don't Cry?" where Carew takes the job which is offered to him in this first show, "The Moroville Covenant," an unbelievably bad episode where Carew is still kind of an eager beaver, as he is in "Labyrinth," though he has a very stupid line in this third show.

Poor Duke's character is usually even more suppressed in this final season than in earlier ones!

WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN?

After McGarrett has the curse put on him, he talks to the Governor, referring to Andy and his vigilante justice, saying "There's an angry lion in the streets, Governor. I'm afraid he's gonna do some damage before we can control him. I think we should be prepared for that."

CASUALTY LIST:

Thanks to Bobbi for help with the Casualty Lists in this season. Where someone is injured seriously and they are not confirmed dead, a "best guess" may be made that they died from their injuries.

    Injury: Sam Limahelu beaten by Santos (Peter Kalua) and Napali (Jack Hisatake) and two other thugs working for Johnny Mio and Tony Alika.
    Injury: "Uncle" Benny's hands broken by Santos and Napali.
    Injury (x2): Santos and Napali forced to put their hands on a hot hood when cornered by Andy Kamoku, Moki Kalehi and vigilantes.
    Injury: Billy Swan knocked out by Carew.
    Injury: Moki shot by Alika’s thugs in drive-by.
    Injury (x3): Kamoku dispatches Alika's two thugs and Billy Swan at Alika’s beach house.

MORE TRIVIA:

  • Both William Smith and Moe Keale have horrible pictures in the main credits — their faces seem distorted.
  • In the opening credits, the Waikiki movie theatre's marquee features "Valley of the Dolls" — a movie from 1967 (probably a stock shot).
  • Some of the other headlines in the issue of the Honolulu Advertiser which has a huge banner headline: "Honolulu Tea Party," with a subhead, "Tons of Marijuana Washed Up on Local Beach" are "Sunday Talks On Pensions Being Mulled" and "Political Placards' Removal Is Asked By Zoning Director."
  • A precursor to the fax machine with the phone plugged into a modem-like device is seen in the Five-O office.
  • Duke is revealed to be a college graduate with two degrees.

GALLERY:

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261. (S12E02) Who Says Cops Don't Cry ★★★  DUKE, BOOK HIM 

Original air date: 10/11/79 — Opening CreditsEnd Credits
Director: Jack Lord; Producer: Andrew Gottlieb (Hollywood); Writer: Robert Janes; Music: Morton Stevens
Timings: Teaser: 0:32; Main Titles: 0:58; Act One: 13:52; Act Two: 11:49; Act Three: 10:17; Act Four: 11:50; End Credits: 0:39; Total Time: 49:57.

QUICK PLOT:

After a Honolulu policewoman witnesses her husband being gunned down by robbers, she embarks on a personal crusade to bring them to justice.

Click here to read Full Plot.

REVIEW:

Having not seen this episode for some time, I couldn't believe how good it was. Maybe this is because it's almost the last show I am re-viewing from the twelfth season, which overall is legendarily bad. Or maybe it's because this was the first show actually made for the twelfth season, which accounts for the fact that it seems there is a certain "freshness" about the acting and directing (the latter by Jack Lord, the last of the six episodes he did in this capacity).

HPD cop Kevin Wilson (Frankie Stevens) is going to become a member of Five-O, but just prior to this, he is killed during a robbery at the Windjammer Market's check cashing booth. His wife Lori (Sharon Farrell), also a member of HPD who is with him as they have the day off, manages to shoot Lloyd Dawson (Darrell Fetty), one of the people in the gang, in the leg. The gang's driver, Terry Pryor (Leeanah Roberts), a woman, is killed.

After escaping, Lloyd manages to get his brother Ben (Alan Fudge), who was a medic in Vietnam, to fix his wound. Ben makes Lloyd promise not to try a stunt like this again, especially since he says "now I am an accessory to murder because I treated you." When Lloyd says this caper was his "swan song," Ben yells "Bull!" (as in "Bullshit") twice and calls Lloyd a liar. Lloyd assures Ben that "As soon as I can travel, I'm gone. You won't ever see me again." However, Lloyd and his two pals who survived the shooting, Otis (Johnny Walker, the black guy Danno abused in S11E06, "A Distant Thunder") and Reed (Reggie Ho) are already planning another robbery.

Sharon Farrell delivers a very emotional performance as Lori, who is totally distraught as could be expected, taking it upon herself to track down her husband's killer. Soon after Kevin is killed, McGarrett and Carew find her jogging around the Dillingham Fountain neighborhood. This would typically be categorized as "people respond to tragedy in different ways" but is not acknowledged as such in the show.

Kimo Carew is still making up his mind as to whether he should take advantage of McGarrett's offer to join Five-O, but he keeps tabs on Lori, trying to get her back on track. Carew is unusually empathetic with her because his wife and daughter were killed by criminals on the mainland, and William Smith plays this very well.

Of course, because this is the twelfth season, there are some issues.

Lori pretends to be Julie Pryor from the mainland, the sister of Terry, the woman killed in the robbery. Presumably because of the trope we have seen before that "Honolulu is really not such a big town," she is able to track down the specific store which sold a designer blouse to Terry. Lori got this blouse from the HPD property room, but as Julie, she says she got the blouse "from my sister" which is an odd thing to say, because Linda (Carole Kai), the woman from the store where the blouse was sold exclusively, knows that Terry was killed in the shootout.

Linda says that Terry bought the blouse from her, "right off my back," during a fashion show at Quentin's Wharf restaurant, which is owned by Ben Dawson. Lori/Julie says she is "trying desperately to find out where [her sister] lived," which does not make sense. This would have been better handled if Lori/Julie explained that she had come to Honolulu to pick up Terry's possessions and also to try and make sense of what happened to her sister.

Lori/Julie goes to the restaurant where she meets Ben. She uses an expression similar to the one in the clothing store — "I'm trying to locate my sister … Terry Pryor," and Ben also knows who she is talking about: "I read about her in the paper." She tells Ben, "In a letter she mentioned buying this blouse at a fashion show here in this restaurant. She also mentioned meeting this great guy. I thought maybe it might be you … I just have to find out what happened to my sister. I just can't believe she'd get involved in anything like that."

She tells Ben words to the effect "Don't call me, I'll call you," and he phones Lloyd after she leaves. Lloyd is kind of suspicious, but tells Ben to arrange a meeting between himself and Julie at the restaurant. Lori/Julie later gets together with Lloyd, wondering if he is the "great guy," but he says no. Not getting much other information, she leaves, saying "I just wanna talk to him [the guy]. I just have to be sure what really happened to Terry."

When Lloyd leaves the restaurant, Lori is driving away and just happens to see him limping, so she knows he is the one who was shot. He says, "Damn it, my leg. I think she made me" to Reed and Otis who are waiting for him in a car. I am surprised that he didn't remember her from the robbery when he just met her in the restaurant, but when she was shooting, she was taking cover behind a fisherman's truck.

Ben is looking out the window of the restaurant and sees all this, and he goes and calls the police, though I don't know if he knows she is a cop. Lori goes home, tailed by Lloyd and his two pals in a much more subtle way than Five-O usually does. Reed and Otis enter her place and shots are fired. Duke and Carew, who heard that Lori never showed up for work at HPD today, arrive at her place, seemingly just as the two bad guys leave, scared off, but I think they had already left. I don't think Ben's call to the cops has any connection to them arriving there.

Shaken, Lori soon goes back to the restaurant and finds out from Ben where his brother and pals are staying. She goes there and figures out that they are likely going to try and rob the Island Shoppers Market on Lani Street, which also has check-cashing. She takes a cab rather than her own car, and calls McGarrett from a pay phone to let him know about the possible upcoming robbery. McGarrett is not happy that she is pursuing the gang on her own and orders her to come into the office. She hangs up on him.

Lori is then shown at a phone booth, but not the one she called McGarrett from, but one across the street from the Island Shoppers Market (this is confusing), and already McGarrett, Duke and Kimo are inside the market, the latter two pretending to be employees! Duke is dressed as a security guard rather than a cop (where did he get the outfit?). When the gang puts their plan into action, there is a gun battle with Reed and Otis getting killed. Lloyd gets in his car, but Lori is in the seat behind him and she holds her gun to his head. How did she get in the car? There was no way she could have gotten in without going through the gun battle and/or having the men from Five-O see her!

There is one scene in the show which kind of salacious. When Lori arrives home after meeting Lloyd at the restaurant and having him and the others tail her, we see her peel off her skirt (seen from Farrell's shapely legs on down), but she keeps her high heels on, walking into another room. I don't understand the point of this.

At the end of the show, Lori, who already expressed a desire to take her husband's place on Five-O to McGarrett after Kevin's funeral, is offered a job as is Carew, and both of them accept. While it may seem odd of McGarrett to make such an offer, the last few seasons have seen him make errors in judgement (think S11E19, "A Very Personal Matter") and sometimes even act kind of soft-headed.

Despite the lapses in logic above, I think there are things in this episode that could stand up well to other cop shows of the time, particularly those with the innovation of a woman on the team or force. This is by far Sharon Farrell's best performance of the twelfth season. It's too bad that the writers didn't know what to do with her after this, giving her "yes sir/no sir/on it" parts more associated with characters like Duke as well as Chin Ho, Ben and Kono from earlier in the series.

A big question remains, though: what the heck happened with the rest of the twelfth season?

CASUALTY LIST:

    Death: Terry Pryor shot by Lori during attempted robbery of Windjammer Market check-cashing booth.
    Death: Kevin Wilson shot by Reed.
    Injury: Lloyd Dawson shot in the leg by Lori.
    Death: Otis shot by Duke, then Kimo.
    Death: Reed shot twice by Duke.

MORE TRIVIA:

  • The Island Shopper's Market is at 14 Lani Street, phone number 555-8600 (both bogus). A sign in the window advertises ahi sashimi for $4.00. Walter Omori, the "mysterious actor," is seen, uncredited, as a grocery bagger in the market.
  • Jori Remus appears as the maid at Lloyd Dawson's place which is at 1010 Koko Place, Kahala.
  • The funeral for Lori's husband Kevin seems rather small. Typically police funerals are attended by huge amounts of cops, both from the dead cop's jurisdiction and also others all over North America.
  • McGarrett is out of town during some of the show, testifying before a federal grand jury in San Francisco. When he phones home, his credit card number is 177-3881-1848.
  • Lori drives a red Mustang, license number 1A-633.
  • Truck isn't in the show, though Duke talks to him on the phone.
  • Jack Lord also directed the last episode starring Sharon Farrell, S11E10, "Why Won't Linda Die?
  • Across the street from the market at the beginning of the show near the docks is a sign with "KONO" written on it in large letters. Is this another example of "Kono's Revenge"?
  • The show has an excellent score by Morton Stevens that occasionally hearkens back to S09E12, "The Bells Toll at Noon." The Five-O theme appears briefly in the second act.
  • After McGarrett convinces Lori not to blow Lloyd away at the end of the show, he tells Duke to "book him."

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262. (S12E03) Though The Heavens Fall BOMB – NO STARS!  BOOK HIM, KIMO 

Original air date: 10/18/79 — Opening CreditsEnd Credits
Director: Harry F. Hogan III; Producers: Andrew Gottlieb (Hollywood), William F. Phillips (Hawaii); Writer: Frank Telford; Music: Bruce Broughton
Timings: Teaser: 0:32; Main Titles: 0:58; Act One: 10:09; Act Two: 13:20; Act Three: 11:53; Act Four: 12:20; End Credits: 0:39; Total Time: 49:51.

QUICK PLOT:

A group of high-society vigilantes are determined to see that justice is done — even if they have to do it themselves.

Click here to read Full Plot.

REVIEW:

The bad guys in this show are members of Nu Epsilon ("Notable Enterprises"), an organization operating out of the exclusive Sportsmen's Game Country Club on Oahu. They engage in "eye for an eye" vigilante justice against those who get off criminal charges on technicalities because of the "mush-brained courts."

Richard Slade, played by Robert ("Brady Bunch") Reed, is the leader of Nu Epsilon, which consists of 12 members, all of whom have done some "dangerous feat" like "bag a Bengal tiger in India, climb the Matterhorn, or cross the ocean solo in a sailboat."

At the beginning of the show, Slade, pretending to be handicapped, deals with a guy named Danby who recently beat the rap in court. In the seedy part of town, Slade lures Danby into a parking garage where he dishes out "justice" in the form of a nasty beating and a "V" carved into Danby's arm with a sword. Some friend of Danby's who was likely hoping to help rob Slade or give him a good workover is put out of action by one of Slade's two associates using a South American "bola." But how did Slade know that Danby would be in that part of Honolulu, and how did he know — assuming that Danby was even in that part of town — that Danby would follow him into the parking garage? Already things are getting dumb.

Later, McGarrett goes to check out the country club, operating on a hunch that only the idle rich would have the time to engage in such "sport" as happened with Danby. He runs into Diana Webster (Elyssa Davalos, daughter of Richard, who starred in S09E17, "A Capitol Crime," and who was James Dean's brother in the film East of Eden). McGarrett met her at a governor's ball a couple of years before. He compliments her, "You're pretty." She says "My, how much you've grown," to which McGarrett retorts, "Touché!" (Davalos is attractive, though her character comes across as superficial, considering the horrible lines she is given.)

McGarrett talks to Diana's father Elliott (Dennis Patrick, who looks like the Man from Glad), president of the club, saying he knows a friend who needs a job there (Truck, who will be undercover under the name of Tom Kahele). Webster asks, "Dark skinned?" McGarrett says, "Does that make a difference?" Webster replies, "No, of course not. Just have him call my secretary."

On her way to work, Lori stops at a crime scene where Meredith Howell (Michael Strong) has been arrested after he is suspected of beating his wife to death when he was very drunk. When Lori arrives at the office after this, Kimo asks her "What're we doing? Keeping banking hours, police lady?" She doesn't respond, which is unusual, because during most of the show she acts very hyper.

Lori looks at the blackboard in the office where there are some jottings relating to the vigilante acts and immediately starts drawing conclusions about the Nu Epsilon members being the ones who are responsible. McGarrett straightens her out after Kimo says, "It about puts the icing on the cake, doesn't it?" McGarrett tells him, "Not even the icing, Kimo. We haven't one iota of evidence."

Howell goes to court very quickly, where the case against him is thrown out because the cops didn't read him his rights before he confessed to the crime. At the club, Slade and the members of Nu Epsilon vote to take care of Howell. Their method is hardly secret; each of them pick a black ball (meaning "guilty") out of a tray in front of them and put it into a bag which Slade then dumps out into his tray. Everyone can see what everyone else is voting, so what is the point trying to make this hush-hush?

Truck, who is now a waiter at the club, stands outside the door to the room where this kangaroo court is taking place and overhears everything, including Nu Epsilon's Latin motto. He tells all he heard to McGarrett who shows up later, and McGarrett knows exactly what the Latin means — maybe he studied the language in school? On the other hand, McGarrett doesn't know what "nu epsilon" means, but is told what it means when he meets Slade while the latter is practising fencing at the club.

As a result of the potential threat against the now freed Howell's life, Kimo and Lori are assigned to give him protective custody. McGarrett tells Lori over the phone, "I want a 24-hour guard on Meredith Howell, starting right now ... You and Kimo get on it."

When they arrive at Howell's place, he tells them he doesn't want them inside, because he wants to reminisce with his dead wife's possessions. The dialogue for this scene is really laughable, but nothing compared to what follows, which is one of Five-O's stupidest sequences ever. Kimo and Lori sit outside Howell's house in their car eating sandwiches and the conversation between the two is totally banal: Lori: "Lovely neighborhood"; Kimo: "Yeah, it is"; Lori: "Very peaceful"; Kimo: "Yeah." Finally, Kimo feels the urge to talk to McGarrett, and goes into Howell's house to use the phone — isn't there a radio in their car? DUH!!

They find the despondent Howell has disappeared and they don't even consider the fact that he might have jumped off the balcony at the rear of his house, which is above a sheer cliff. What actually happened was the vigilantes climbed up the cliff and the balcony and absconded with Howell, who passed out from drinking an entire bottle of Cameron scotch, which is weird, because he earlier told the two cops, "Do you think I'll ever take another drink? After what I did to Mavis?"

Later, back at the office, McGarrett is very pissed at Kimo, screaming, "Well, that was dumb, Kimo, really dumb!" Kimo replies, "Look, I know that ... I said I was sorry." McGarrett replies, "Sorry, hell!" concluding sarcastically with "OK, we'll never find him standing here, will we, Kimo. Get on it ... Truck might need some help, eh?"

Kimo looks like he wants to kill McGarrett, but instead goes undercover without any preliminary explanation as an archery expert named Jim Collins (seriously). Kimo meets Diana not at the club, but on a public range, where she is practising for a tournament in which her "team" will be participating. Diana gets Kimo a job at the club right away, because her father is the boss there. But how did he know she would be at this location? It seems strange that he would suddenly be offered a job with the club. Did the club's previous instructor just quit? And since when is Kimo an archery expert whose ability to hit the target is very good?

Diana is attracted to Kimo, and a couple of days later, the two of them go horseback riding on the club's 500-acre "private game preserve." After Diana gives Kimo a smooch, she tells him that he is "the only real man on these premises" other than the Nu Epsilon group, whose "idea of a great little gal is someone who follows them on their tiger hunts ten paces behind, toting supplies on her head." Kimo, who has a huge smile on his face, describes the vigilante group's members as "male chauvinists."

The two of them head for the sportsmen's lodge, with the suggestion that they might be going there to "do it," when they are interrupted by one of the vigilantes named Morgan (Jerry LeRal) taking a shot at them because he is supposedly trying to warn them about some wild boars who are roaming around. Later when Diana tells Slade about this incident, he says that "Warning shots are sometimes [Morgan's] idea of a joke."

Slade and his pals soon start discussing Collins, the "new archery instructor," and when one of them with knowledge of the world of archery says "I never heard of him," Slade says "I'm a bit uptight about people of whom we've never heard."

Kimo and Truck's covers are soon blown when Harrison (John Allen), another of the vigilantes, overhears a phone conversation between Truck and Five-O headquarters. This whole scene is stupid, especially with Harrison having convinced the receptionist to let him listen in to the call with headphones. There is no reason for the vigilantes to be suspicious about anyone at this level yet.

Along with the kidnapped Howell, the two men from Five-O are slated for execution. They are taken to the lodge where Howell is already being held captive, but they soon escape after the door to the place is intentionally left open. Truck gets shot by one of the pursuing men and Kimo takes Truck's belt and applies a tourniquet to the wound, which makes no sense, because aside from being on the outside of Truck's jacket, the tourniquet is below where Truck was hit!

McGarrett, likely alerted by the sexy Five-O receptionist Luana (Laura Sode) that Truck's call was cut off, arrives soon at the club by police helicopter. He tells Webster and his daughter stuff which seems very speculative, such as that the vigilantes kidnapped Howell and that they probably have imprisoned the two cops too. Diana says, "What do you think those macho clowns will do to them?"

Diana tells McGarrett that the vigilantes' hideout is probably the lodge, which is at "Chinaman's Hat on the North Shore." Last time I looked at a map of Oahu, Chinaman's Hat was on the east side near Waikane. McGarrett confuses things even further when he says "Right on Chinaman's Hat," which is stupid, because Chinaman's Hat is an island out in the ocean, not part of the game preserve.

McGarrett and cops from HPD eventually round up all the bad guys. Rather than pick up the wounded Truck at the end with the helicopter and take him to the hospital, McGarrett, not even using a bullhorn, merely tells him and Kimo from the air, "Well done, see you at home, fellows!" and flies away. The two men look at him incredulously. If you look carefully, it seems like Kimo is going to give McGarrett the "finger"!

At the end, there is a huge twist. Slade is in a room at HPD, and McGarrett tells him, "I got a call just a little while ago from the district attorney. Howell beat his wife unconscious, then passed out drunk. A 16-year-old burglar named Ellis then came on the scene, tried to take a diamond studded watch from Mrs. Howell's wrist. She came to screaming. Now, he then hit her repeatedly and brutally and the beating killed her. This morning, he was picked up trying to pawn the watch. Two hours ago, he confessed in the presence of his attorney."

Of course, Slade says he wants a lawyer. McGarrett makes a profound speech about constitutional rights and the permissive society, then tells Kimo to "book him," making sure to "read him his rights."

WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN?

The motto of the bad guys in the show is fiat justitia, ruat cælum, Latin for "Let justice be done, though the heavens fall."

CASUALTY LIST:

    Injury (x2): Danby and Makua are beaten by Richard Slade and two members of Nu Epilson.
    Death: Mavis Howell beaten by Meredith Howell but finished off by Ellis (not seen by us).
    Injury: Morgan shoved to the ground by Kimo.
    Injury: Truck shot in the arm by Slade.
    Injury: Harrison falls down cliff after being forced over by HPD helicopter.
    Injury: Slade knocked out by Kimo.

MORE TRIVIA:

  • When McGarrett arrives at the club at the beginning of the show, he is not driving the Marquis Brougham, but a black Ford LTD with license number 2H-3524, not McGarrett's stock license F6-3958.
  • During the helicopter chase at the end, one of the stunts looks extremely dangerous. If you watch the vigilante who is underneath the copter, it looks like he changes to a stunt man between shots.
  • At the beginning of the show, McGarrett comes into his office complaining "Who made the coffee, or is it left over from last night"? Lori says "Not me." (No one else speaks up.)
  • In the sleazy part of Honolulu, a toy monkey clapping cymbals is seen. Behind Slade, as he is walking down the street, you can see the marquee for the Esquire Theatre, which advertises "Coeds Stage Show." There are posters in the area for "Bobby Lester Fox Hunters" and "Live Stage Show — Act of Love."
  • There is confusion concerning some of the locations. At the beginning of the show, Truck says, "All the original crimes occurred in the same neighborhood." By "original crimes," what does he mean? The crimes the "dirtbags" Danby and the other guy committed for which they got off the hook, or the vigilante attacks on them? Lori says, "But Pacific Hills is one of the most exclusive areas in Oahu." Truck also suggests that the attacks on the two men with a sword and bola at the beginning of the show happened at the north end of the island. I don't think so! And McGarrett adds, "There are two or three organizations in that area [meaning Pacific Hills], including the ultra exclusive Sportsmen's Game Club. Now, all of these crimes occurred within ... one mile of that club." Is he suggesting this exclusive area is a mile away from the seedy part of town with sleazy clubs, bars and porno theaters?
  • At around 12:44 on the DVD, Lori returns to the office after being at Howell's place. McGarrett is tapping on his desk with a pencil. Lori moves towards the chalkboard, saying "Who do we have here? Notable Enterprises. What a lousy name for a band of vigilantes. Sounds more like a real-estate development." The camera switches back to McGarrett, who now holds a folder. I would like to know what is written on this folder (you can barely see it).
  • The expression "most dangerous game," is heard twice during the show. It refers to a famous short story by Richard Connell published in 1924 which has seen multiple movie adaptations, the plot of which concerns a big game hunter on an island who chooses to hunt humans for sport.
  • McGarrett tells Webster that his handicap (presumably golf) is seven. According to my wife, who plays golf, this is pretty good!
  • Peggy Oumansky, the old woman who appeared in the earlier episodes "F.O.B. Honolulu" and "Retire in Hawaii — Forever," has a brief role as a spectator coming out of the courtroom where the case against Howell was thrown out. It sounds like she and the woman with her attend trials because they have nothing else to do.
  • Brian Graham-Jones, who took part in this episode, sends along some interesting anecdotes.
  • McGarrett wears a leisure suit during the helicopter sequences at the end of the show. The helicopter, a Bell 206, number N789PR, crashed several months later on January 19, 1980. No one was killed or injured.
  • The music accompanying the waves in this show is pretty boring. The score is by Broughton, which is OK, but he has done better!

GALLERY:

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263. (S12E04) Sign Of The Ram ★½  BOOK HIM 

Original air date: 10/25/79 — Opening CreditsEnd Credits
Director: Ralph Levy; Producers: Gene Levitt (Hawaii), Andrew Gottlieb (Hollywood); Writer: Sam Roeca; Music: Richard Clements
Timings: Teaser: 0:32; Main Titles: 0:58; Act One: 11:24; Act Two: 11:54; Act Three: 8:59; Act Four: 15:29; End Credits: 0:39; Total Time: 49:55.

QUICK PLOT:

Another astrologer's ominous warnings tempt the skeptical McGarrett to follow her clues in his investigation of a murder.

Click here to read Full Plot.

REVIEW:

This show features perhaps the most irritating character in the entire series — astrologer Jessica Humboldt ("like the current"), played by Jayne Meadows. She is a "professional colleague" of Agnes DuBois (Samantha Eggar) who appeared in S11E02. Humboldt's character will not shut up from the beginning to the end of the episode with a voice that reminds me of fingernails on a blackboard combined with a yappy dog. Not surprisingly, this episode has the worst user rating on IMDb.

This episode has comedic elements, and it made me think of another (but much better) comedy, S05E13, "I'm A Family Crook — Don't Shoot!" In that show, a mob boss who got fed up with his bagman's excuses for losing a pile of money plugged him point blank three times. The boss's stooge then said to him, "Suppose he was telling us the truth?" and the boss replied, "Then I made a terrible mistake." In that episode this scene is kind of funny.

I started to think that McGarrett really should have shot Humboldt dead, but it is not nice to say that and probably wouldn't have been too amusing. This would never happen, anyway, because McGarrett is far too tolerant of her. You get the impression when she talks he is sort of half-listening and he is biting his tongue which is thoroughly in his cheek when he speaks to her.

Humboldt is astrological advisor to Pete Shore, a boxing contender whose life is totally ruled by her analyses and predictions. Shore is played by Joe Moore, who appeared on the show 11 times, with one more to go in the twelfth season (S12E14, "The Golden Noose"). Moore, who has been a TV personality in Honolulu since 1969 and a news anchor since 1980, does a good job in the biggest role he played in the series, though he is no Robert De Niro in Raging Bull. Presumably because he was just a member of the Five-O stock company, Moore's credit at the end of the show is smaller than the guest stars.

At the beginning of the show, Shore's friend Toby Wesson (uncredited actor) is knocked off by someone shooting into his car in the training gym's parking lot from a nearby hotel. Shore reacts strangely when he sees Wesson's body, saying, "Mars is in the 8th house." McGarrett is creeped out when he hears this, because it brings back memories (most likely bad) of DuBois. Over and above this, though, McGarrett is concerned that Wesson is a mainland gambling figure trying to infiltrate professional sports on the islands, but he turns up clean after an investigation. McGarrett tells Kimo and Lori, "Several major league franchises could come our way soon and we'd welcome them. But we don't want any hoods, gamblers, muscle men or Mafia running them."

Concerned about what Toby's murder means, Shore asks Humboldt and she says, "You remain in a stressful phase and I'm afraid it's going to get worse." Shore is worried that he is going to get knocked out in an upcoming fight against a boxer named Fiddler (Sonny Westbrook), but Humboldt cautions him, "You must stop jumping to dark conclusions. I don't like to predict specifics. You know that … Obey the feeling, Pete. Your sun is conjunct Neptune in your chart. Intuition, gut feeling, if I may, rides high for you."

Humboldt comes to the Five-O offices to let McGarrett know that she is terribly worried about her client Shore, because "he's being closed in on by extremely difficult forces, literally — an invasion of the criminal element. Planetary, I'm sure." Humboldt annoyingly moves the model catamaran off one of McGarrett's desks and replaces it with astrological charts for people in Shore's circle: Eddie Marco (Anthony Ponzini), his manager ("under a most difficult influence, prone to bribery, hypocrisy"), Joe Donovan, IDd by Carew as "a part-time gambler, prizefight owner, full-time in vigorish in the Jersey circles" ("just now entering a prolonged afflicting triangle") and others who are, as Lori says, "a celestial rogues' gallery."

Humboldt wants McGarrett to put a stop to the fight because "it will be a tragedy for Pete." But this is kind of out of McGarrett's jurisdiction. He tells her, "I'm not on the boxing commission." McGarrett assures her they are looking into "the recent influx of criminal sports figures into the islands." Humboldt leaves in a huff, with an attitude like she will be able later to say to McGarrett "I told you so." After she is gone, he calls her a "dingaling.":

Donovan (Eddie Firestone) is hassling Marco because he wants a piece of the action, to the tune of "a hundred thousand for 30 percent of [Shore]." Marco scoffs at this. Humboldt then phones Marco and also hassles him. He calls her "stargazer," and tells her to lay off Pete who has suddenly grown unenthusiastic about his upcoming match.

Shore does very well against Fiddler, who collapses under suspicious circumstances during the fight. The ringside play-by-play is delivered by Les Keiter, a sports announcer in real life, who says, "You just can't believe the power, the reserve power Pete Shore has."

Investigating Wesson's murder, Carew goes to see Wesson's girl friend Licia Nibley (Barbara Kelly) at 3850 Kapiolani Court, only to find Humboldt visiting her. Wesson owned a piece of Shore for the Fiddler fight, sold to him by Marco, which has benefited Nibley to the tune of $65,000. Humboldt tells Carew that the late Wesson's chart "shows a complete lack of business ability and he was under a very powerful beneficial financial sign."

Shore starts getting concerned about his upcoming and very important fight against Gunner Larkin (Dana Goodson). Humboldt tells him that on the night of this fight, "the planets hold a potential for extreme danger." When Humboldt goes to see McGarrett again to tell him what Joe told her after visiting Fiddler, that "he had a feeling that Mr. Fiddler didn't perform up to his full capabilities," McGarrett pooh-poohs what she is saying, probably because of all the astrological nonsense she is uttering. Humboldt leaves in another huff. However, McGarrett is curious to find out if maybe Fiddler was doped while fighting, so he gets Lori to check on that.

Meanwhile, Donovan will not give up his quest to buy a piece of Shore. Saying "I've got an offer you can't refuse," Donovan visits Marco with his thuggish associate Kawika (Jake Hoopai) who puts a huge pile of money on a table, "Two hundred thousand for 40 percent of him." Donovan is convinced that Shore will win. Two hundred thousand is a "lot of money" to Marco, who accepts. But then he ups the ante, phoning various other bettors and overselling "interests" in Shore to the tune of 240%, a total of $1.2 million. The music by Richard Clements in the background during this sounds very much like Marvin Hamlisch's arrangement of Scott Joplin in the film The Sting. When the money is all assembled, Marco tells his associate Banning (Douglas Day) to "put it all on Larkin."

Humboldt goes to see Marco, telling him he should stop the fight, because an analysis of the last six fighters Shore encountered tells her "They all should have won, only they were in a dishonest fix of some kind, subject to bribery or the influence of drugs as in the case of Fiddler." Because this is all true, Banning wants to knock her off, but Marco says all that she says will have no sway with the boxing commission, Five-O or the courts, and besides, "Pete Shore is gonna get murdered."

Lori reports that there was no trace of "dope" in Fiddler's blood tests. McGarrett is beginning to get concerned about the level of Humboldt's interest in the case: "I think she truly believes Pete's in danger."

During the fight against Larkin, Shores initially does very badly. Announcer Keiter says, "Shore almost bewildered. Shore unable to compete. Shore unable to stay with him. He's close for climbing up, he's cracking all the way." As well, McGarrett notices that the people who have invested heavily in Shore "don't look too happy ... looks like they wanna slit throats." But then suddenly Shore makes a miraculous comeback, starting with one punch that announcer Keither says "could turn this fight upside down."

Lori rushes in with information from an FBI photo telex that says the slug that killed Wesson matches one which killed a guard in a mainland robbery five years ago. That was linked to a guy named Eagleton who served time and was released three years later but violated his parole. Then she says that Fiddler's blood test reveals that he was drugged: "They found traces of very heavy barbiturates." This is stupid, because the earlier report Lori got said there were no drugs in his blood!

Lori then whips out a picture of Eagleton, which reveals him to be Banning, and the brainstorm that McGarrett has been having for the last few minutes gets all wrapped up, that Marco sold Shore while he was "hot," and that Wesson knew of the fake buildup and wanted to blab, so that was why he was silenced. When Banning suddenly disappears from ringside, McGarrett asks Carew, "Did Eagleton's M.O. say anything about a telescopic rifle on there?" WHAT?!?

Acting on Marco's orders, Banning goes to the rafters of the arena to assassinate Shore with a long-range rifle in a scene reminiscent of finale of the movie The Manchurian Candidate. He is followed by McGarrett and Carew. When he corners Banning above the arena, McGarrett is uncommonly harsh: "Put it down or I'll blow your brains out!" Banning is busted.

Back at floor level, Shore wins the fight and is now on his way to the championship. Carew lavishes praise on McGarrett for his cleverness: "You figured, Steve, by Banning's M.O. that he had to be in the rafters to kill Pete Shore." There is no indication that the robbery involving Banning five years ago had anything to do with shooting someone from on high, but is McGarrett thinking of how Wesson was knocked off recently?

McGarrett knew that Marco no longer had an interest in Shore when he became glum as Shore started winning, and the investors, who were similarly glum when Shore was losing, suddenly got enthusiastic. McGarrett also figured out that Marco, who was busted after the fight in front of the mortified investors, "oversold and oversold badly. And then he put the whole bundle on Larkin." What a clever guy McGarrett is!

The show ends on a mundane note, with Humboldt finally figuring out that McGarrett is a Capricorn after trying to guess his sign for the entire episode. She tells him that he is "stubborn, opinionated, tenacious and goat-like," which finally concludes her rattling off mumbo-jumbo. Unlike the previous episode with Samantha Eggar, there is no astrological consultant in the end credits.

I've always given this episode a pretty bad rating (one half or one star), but this is mostly for Meadows' irritating characterization. On the other hand, both Carew and Lori are up to the task of investigating, generally showing enthusiasm, perhaps because this was the sixth twelfth season show to be produced. Kimo has lots to do in this show, though Lori's chirpy part is boringly written. After Wesson is killed, she puts in a bit too much effort to determine the angle at which he was shot, and Kimo says "That's a good girl, Lori." When McGarrett asks her to get the original blood test from Fiddler, she replies "Yes, sir," and rushes out of the office. Later, she muffs her lines when referring to "a picture of Eagleton, the guy who got aw... off on parole."

The score for the show is by Richard Clements, his only one for the series. Overall, it is nothing special and the music for the "waves" is super boring.

WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN?

According to a posting at IMDb, "The title refers to the constellation of the ram that is in the zodiac which represents the ring of constellations that lines the ecliptic, which is the apparent path of the Sun across the sky over the course of the year. The ram is called Aries and is the first astrological sign in the Zodiac, named after the golden ram that rescued Phrixos, taking him to the land of Colchis."

CASUALTY LIST:

    Death: Toby Wesson shot while sitting in his car by Banning/Eagleton on orders from Eddie Marco.
    Injury: Fiddler knocked out by Pete Shore and falls into a coma – with the help of drugs slipped to him by Banning/Eagleton on orders from Marco.
    Injury: (x2) Collins and Slaughter knocked out by Shore due to drugs slipped to them by Banning/Eagleton on orders from Marco.
    Injury: Gunner Larkin knocked out by Shore during fight.

MORE TRIVIA:

  • For some reason, Donovan knows knows Carew is a "mainland cop," though Donovan hails from Jersey and Carew was from Boston. Eddie Firestone, who played Donovan was also seen as Stumbles the bum who narrowly avoids getting killed in S02E13, "The Joker's Wild, Man, Wild!"
  • Carew tells McGarrett that Donovan is "full-time in vigorish in the Jersey circles." When Humboldt doesn't understand what he means by "vigorish," thinking he said "vigorous," Carew says "Uh, vigorish, yes, ma'am. That means working the odds." The subtitles are confusing here, because the word "vigorish" is replaced with "vigorous" the two times Carew says it, with "and vigorous" rather than "in vigorish" for the first one. According to m-w.com, "vigorish" means "a charge taken (as by a bookie or a gambling house) on bets; also the degree of such a charge (i.e., a vigorish of five percent)" ... or "interest paid to a moneylender."
  • The scene where Galen Kam as Lee Ting gets a massage from a woman in a bikini walking on his back as he takes a call from Marco is pretty funny (she looks like she is about 16).
  • Laura Sode as Luana is in the credits, but doesn't appear in the show.
  • Banning is shown playing with a device known as a Hoberman sphere (thanks to Vrinda).
  • McGarrett wears a leisure suit.
  • According to an interview with Sharon ("Lori") Farrell, Jack Lord changed Jayne Meadows' lines around so much, the actress broke out in a rash.
  • The "bookem" to Carew is "Book him, murder one."

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264. (S12E05) Good Help Is Hard To Find ★★  BOOK HIM, KIMO (2) 

Original air date: 11/1/79 — Opening CreditsEnd Credits
Director: Beau van den Ecker; Producer: Andrew Gottlieb (Hollywood); Writer: Frank Telford; Music: Morton Stevens
Timings: Teaser: 0:32; Main Titles: 0:58; Act One: 15:34; Act Two: 5:30; Act Three: 11:03; Act Four: 15:37; End Credits: 0:39; Total Time: 49:53.

QUICK PLOT:

The Five-O office is bugged and one of the team is accused of being crooked as a local mob boss attempts to make Five-O look foolish and inept.

Click here to read Full Plot.

REVIEW:

This is the final show featuring Ross Martin as kumu boss Tony Alika, which also sews up some plot elements from S12E01, "A Lion in the Streets."

At the same time he is trying to import angel dust into the islands with the help of Guido Marioni of a Boston crime family (John P. Ryan), Alika arranges for tips to be given to Five-O via Truck's cousin Joey (Dave Lancaster), which turn out to be hoaxes that make Five-O look ridiculous. Because of these tips, Joey wants to get a recommendation from McGarrett for the police academy, despite the fact he failed the entrance exam three times.

The first Five-O fiasco is a raid on a warehouse which involves not only Carew and Truck but also 17 officers from HPD (plus a cat which runs across the screen prior to the action). After Kimo and Truck enter the place, there is a terrific gun battle, but the cops are shooting at silhouette-like targets like you would see on a rifle range. The sound of the criminals' firepower is from a reel-to-reel TEAC tape recorder, model A-4010S, playing 7½" BASF tape. After Carew kicks some cardboard box in frustration, a jack-in-the-box pops up from a wooden crate with a clown that has a sign: "HA! HA! McGARRETT"

A picture of this somehow gets taken, but by whom? It is exactly the same as seen by the camera which is filming the show. This picture gets sent to Alika and is also seen with an insulting caption – "Five-O busts dangerous suspect" — during a broadcast by hard-hitting KLB-TV commentator Mark Maynard who McGarrett detests because he once exposed confidential evidence in a kidnap case. McGarrett calls Maynard "a venal little opportunist [who] exploits that hard-earned freedom [of the press] for personal glory."

Maynard, who is played by Les Keiter, the ringside boxing announcer from the previous show, tears into McGarrett with a rant: "The once vaunted Five-O force has deteriorated to the level of a small-town constabulary. I have received from a confidential source a photograph hilariously illustrating Five-O's most recent fiasco. Is it any wonder that every felon along the coconut grapevine is busting his buttons with laughter? And the butt of this ludicrous joke is a man who is rapidly becoming a joke himself: the head of Five-O, Steve McGarrett. And why is he failing so dismally? Because he is a man of such personal vanity that good men have been resigning in disgust [this is the only hint in the series as to why Danno left Five-O] and have been replaced by incompetent sycophants. Consequently, security has so eroded, that the force can't make a move without the bad guys knowing in advance."

The second hoax that Five-O is sent to supposedly concerns the kumu moving an angel-dust lab to a shack on Hilo Point. But when Lori, Carew and Truck show up, all they find is a kids' ukulele band with a sign "Welcome McGarrett and his Keystone Cops." The woman in charge of the kids tells them, "A very nice man contacted us and asked if we would participate in a surprise salute to Mr. McGarrett and his wonderful officers. This same man even supplied us with pennants and that sign, which he explained was a kind of inside joke. And I personally know that Mr. McGarrett has a wonderful sense of humor." Lori says, "When this hits the telly, we're gonna look like a bunch of fools." Maynard shows up at this comic scene with his TV crew, rubbing it in after his harsh comments during his earlier broadcast. This incident makes The Honolulu Advertiser with headlines "Hawaii Five-O Flops Again: Second Raid in Five Days Nets 'Ukulele Band'."

In addition to all of this, Carew also finds himself in serious trouble. We could have guessed that something going on was fishy when we saw him with Truck in the Five-O office earlier, and in the background was Liani, a cleaning woman (Josie Over). In addition to janitorial work, she is also maintaining a bug in McGarrett's pencil holder which is being monitored outside by C.K. Huang (uncredited) using a receiver which looks like a transistor radio.

McGarrett is summoned to the Governor's office for a meeting with Lieutenant Dexter (Jason Evers) from Internal Affairs, presumably at HPD. Dexter's involvement was requested by the Governor because McGarrett was away in Los Angeles giving a lecture on police security at the beginning of the show and the Governor "felt an immediate investigation was called for by some totally impartial agency." This comment just pisses McGarrett off, but he tells the Governor sarcastically, "Five-O has always operated as a completely independent agency. But since your confidence in that policy has apparently eroded, I welcome the investigation."

Dexter feels that someone on the Five-O staff, most likely one of the two newcomers — Lori and Kimo — is corrupt, and wants them to take lie detector tests. McGarrett agrees, but only if everyone from Five-O takes the test, including himself. There is some verbal sparring with Dexter who says,"Are you aware that Carew was dismissed by the Boston PD? Do you know that the investigation came within a hairsbreadth of lodging criminal charges against him?" McGarrett replies, "I also know that he was permitted to resign without prejudice. I also suspect that in your well-known objectivity, you already have him charged, convicted and imprisoned, huh?"

The case against Carew gets tighter when Alika arranges for Johnny, a forger (uncredited actor), to duplicate Carew's signature to create an account at the Citizens National Bank based on paperwork from Carew's file at Five-O which Liani photocopied. Wearing a non-janitorial outfit and looking like a clueless babe, Liani gets Carew's fingerprint on an envelope which is later put into a safety deposit box at the bank with $20,000 inside, which looks like a bribe of some kind.

Meanwhile, Truck's cousin gets nervous because he thinks people are tailing him, and ends up getting stabbed to death in his apartment. When Carew gets his gun and badge taken away from him by Dexter, Truck freaks out, thinking that it was Carew that ratted Joey out. McGarrett has to jump between the two men to separate them.

Marioni is nervous early in the show when he sees Carew at Alika's place hassling the kumu boss. Marioni was responsible for killing Carew's wife and daughter by mistake in Boston when he and his brother Vince wanted to convince Carew "to keep his cop's nose out of our business," after which Carew tracked down Vince and killed him. Marioni is so freaked out by Carew's presence that he wants to leave town, but Alika tells him to stick around, because his behind-the-scenes hassling of Five-O and Carew specifically will be to Marioni's benefit.

Carew does not run into Guido until the show's end, when Marioni is shown bringing angel dust ashore at Makua Beach from a boat offshore. This was one of Joey's last tips, which turns out to be right. Five-O, using the bug in McGarrett's office, pretends to be elsewhere, but they are waiting at Makua Beach. When Carew sees Marioni coming ashore, the music swells up in a huge manner, and he rushes after the man he has been thinking about in a vengeful way for months.

Kimo chases Marioni up a rocky cliff, climaxing in an awkwardly staged scene where Marioni falls over a ledge and looks desperately to Carew to save him. Carew does grab Marioni's sleeve, but it rips, sending the mobster to a grisly death.

The ending is full of banal dialogue between Carew and McGarrett. Kimo: "I really tried [to hold him]. But I wish somebody would tell me why." McGarrett: "Because you're a cop, and that's what cops do. We leave the rest up to the courts." Kimo: "Yeah, I guess that's it, Steve. It's really strange. I dreamed of nothing but revenge for years but I don't feel good now." McGarrett: "Revenge is a cruel word, Kimo. It hurts only the people who practice it." Puh-leeze! William Smith does the best he can with this dialogue.

Predictably, Maynard shows up with his camera crew at the beach, but Truck tells him to get lost. McGarrett says he has a "house call" to make … which is at Alika's place where he arrests the kumu kingpin, charging him with Joey's murder — but on what evidence?

One good thing about this show is the performance by Moe Keale as Truck — probably his most dramatic of the final season. Ross Martin has some good scenes as Alika, incorporating the same kind of menace we find in Nehemiah Persoff's gangster performances, but he chews the scenery shamelessly. The part of Dexter is lamely written compared to that of Bernie Fryer from Internal Affairs in S10E04, "The Friends of Joey Kalima." That of Marioni isn't much better.

The music is by Morton Stevens, which is above-average, as one might expect.

WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN?

McGarrett uses the title at the end of the show when he is busting Alika. He runs his hand on a lamp, finding it dusty, and says "You are letting this place go to pot, aren't you? I know that good help is hard to find, but I have just the woman for you … A cleaning woman. I'd say that she'd be available in, uh, five to ten. Years, that is." He is referring to Liani, who has obviously also been busted.

CASUALTY LIST:

    Death: Joey, Truck’s cousin, is stabbed to death.
    Injury: Thug bringing chemicals for angel dust to shore shot by HPD officer.
    Death: Guido Marioni falls off cliff as Kimo tries to hang onto him.

MORE TRIVIA:

  • There is an elevator in the hall outside the Five-O office which is used during this show. As far as I recall, this is the only time this elevator is ever seen during the entire series.
  • When Liani gets Carew to put his fingerprint on the envelope from the hotel, if she doesn't know where the hotel is, why would she have a blank envelope from the place? Carew later describes her as "the same little fox that tricked me."
  • When discussing Marioni's whereabouts, Alika pronounces his name correctly, but his manservant Billy Swan (Jerry Boyd) calls him "Mariano."
  • Carew uses the expression "ironical, isn't it?", something you would expect from McGarrett. The DVD subtitles translate this as just "ironic."
  • Marioni is staying at the Hawaiian Regent Hotel.
  • In this episode, Edward Vierra, who plays the menacing Santos in "A Bird in Hand...," is one of the crooks (uncredited) bringing the shipment of angel dust to Oahu.
  • At the end of the show, McGarrett is wearing a jeans outfit similar to the one he wears in the series finale, "Woe to Wo Fat." He tells Kimo to "book them" — twice.
  • The subtitles say the piece the kids' ukulele band is playing is "Yankee Doodle," but it is "Yankee Doodle Dandy" by George M. Cohan, the piece heard at the end of S09E12, "The Bells Toll At Noon." Maybe CBS got the rights to use this more than once?
  • Marioni smokes a cigarillo.

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265. (S12E06) Image Of Fear ★½  BOOK HER, KIMO 

Original air date: 11/8/79 — Opening CreditsEnd Credits
Director: Herbert Hirschman; Producer: Andrew Gottlieb (Hollywood); Writer: James Schmerer; Music: Don Ray
Timings: Teaser: 0:31; Main Titles: 0:59; Act One: 14:35; Act Two: 7:55; Act Three: 11:48; Act Four: 13:20; End Credits: 0:39; Total Time: 49:47.

QUICK PLOT:

A criminal put away by a woman's prosecutor ex-husband attempts to drive her crazy after he is paroled.

Click here to read Full Plot.

REVIEW:

Poor Soon-Tek Oh! He appeared on the show 8 times, every time something villainous like a traitor, a psychopath or something equally bad. This episode, featuring him in his final Five-O appearance, is no different.

As the show begins, his character, Robert Kwon, is stalking Joan Carter (the attractive Linda Marsh) in the middle of the night. He disables her telephone line and enters her house. When she encounters him, she shoots him with a revolver, and it appears that she was successful – there is blood on his shirt and he falls to the floor. Joan takes her young daughter Annie (Katie Kurtzman) and goes to the neighbor's. But when cops and Five-O show up, there is no indication that Kwon was there.

Joan was formerly married to Assistant District Attorney Gary Carter (Guy Boyd), both of them old friends of McGarrett. The couple had a nasty divorce several years ago. During court proceedings, Gary insisted Joan was an unfit mother and he unsuccessfully demanded custody of Annie. When Gary shows up concerned the next day, there is no love lost between Joan and him. She tells Gary, "I don't have time for you today … We're divorced. What happens in my life doesn't concern you anymore."

Joan is not happy that Gary found out about what happened from Nancy Warren (Patricia Herman), her next door neighbor to whose house Joan and Annie fled the night before. Nancy was a former secretary in the D.A.'s office with whom Gary was "close" before he met Joan. "Nan" moved next door to Joan a couple of years ago, an odd coincidence which seems designed just to make the plot more complicated.

Having been dragged into the case because of his friendship, McGarrett is hard-pressed to believe Joan about shooting Kwon, especially in light of the fact that a few years before she "suffered delusions, claimed things were happening when they weren't [and] spent a year in a private hospital." Carew, who sounds annoyed about having to go to work in the middle of the night, is blunt in his remarks to McGarrett over what he thinks has not happened to Joan, considering the lack of a corpse.

The next day when Joan takes Annie to school, Kwon is across the street from there getting his car fixed. Predictably, Joan freaks out, almost running him over with her car. She starts slapping Kwon around and scratching his face. Later, Kwon is hauled down to the Five-O offices, where he says he has never seen her before in his life.

Kwon is released, but Gary, who also shows up, wonders why McGarrett never booked him. (The answer is "On what charge?", duh!) Gary's reaction seems odd, since he doesn't seem to know who Kwon is. Five years before, Gary successfully prosecuted Kwon for armed robbery, for which he served time. Not only that, Gary says Kwon, who protested his innocence, "made wild threats at me in court," speculating that's why Kwon is going after Joan now, not knowing that the two of them are divorced.

When Joan and Gary leave Five-O, Kwon is watching them from afar, but when Joan points him out to Gary, who did not see him, Kwon disappears again. Soon after this, Joan and her new boyfriend Stan Thomas (Wayne Ward) are having lunch in a restaurant, and Kwon is their waiter, yet another odd plot machination, which sends her screaming from the place. A day or so later, Joan comes home from shopping and finds her two pet birds are dead. But when McGarrett shows up at her request, both birds are alive in their cage, chirping away. Joan describes herself as an "overwrought woman," telling McGarrett he is just being kind to her because he thinks she is sick.

McGarrett gets Carew and Lori to check pet stores and see if anyone has purchased similar birds — nanday conures — recently. They find one store sold two of them and the owner identifies Kwon as the man who bought them. Hauled into Five-O again, Kwon is fed up, saying that he did buy two such birds, but they died and he threw them in the garbage. He asks McGarrett, "What did you expect me to do with them? Hold a funeral?"

Of course, this just irritates the already annoyed McGarrett more, who says, "Let me lay it out for you, Mr. Kwon. I know that you're in this deeply. You're not fooling anyone. Now, I'm warning you, stay away from Joan Carter and her daughter, you understand that?" Kwon will have none of this: "I served my time. I got a job. I work at Sea Life Park [this is odd, since he was working at the restaurant]. I haven't committed any crimes yet. And until I do, you have no right to harass me like this. It seems to me that you're the one who's doing the harassing." He leaves the office.

Carew continues his skepticism, wondering why they are wasting time with the case. Can you imagine James MacArthur's Danno talking back to McGarrett like this?

We finally figure out what is going on at the end of Act 3. The person behind Kwon's actions is Annie, who's after an inheritance from her grandmother given to her mother for safe-keeping. If Annie has this money, she can run away to the mainland where her boyfriend lives. One has to seriously wonder if the kid is really capable of masterminding such an elaborate scheme, which is what McGarrett wonders about Kwon.

Annie meets with Kwon at Sea Life Park, where he is employed to pick up litter. She tells him, "Everything's going just fine," but he says, "Not for me. McGarrett's on my back. Sooner or later he'll have me in the slammer again. I want to go for the money now, kid. Get off the island fast." She replies, "Of course, that's the way I planned it. And I don't like people calling me 'kid'."

Soon after this, Kwon phones Joan and tells her to go to the bank and get $100,000. It seems odd that this is an amount mentioned that is close to the total of the inheritance, and Joan doesn't realize there is something fishy going on. What is also strange is that after Joan gets the cash, the bank phones Gary to tell him that Joan took it out, even though it is in Joan's name and they are divorced. Gary phones McGarrett and tells him about this, and McGarrett rushes to Joan's place, but she has already left for Sea Life Park.

McGarrett encounters Annie at the house and she sends him on a wild goose chase to the "lighthouse" on Diamond Head Road. On his way there, however, he has a brainstorm that something is amiss, especially after he flashes on a popcorn box from Sea Life which Annie was holding and the fact that Kwon is now working there. McGarrett swings the Mercury Brougham around and heads to Sea Life. The route he takes there is kind of peculiar, because he's seen driving down the road on the ocean side of the Ilikai Hotel which actually leads to a dead end, and in the next scene he arrives at the aquatic park, which is out in the sticks on the southeast corner of Oahu, about 10 miles from the Ilikai.

Joan hands the money over to the money-grubbing Kwon, trying to make him agree to certain conditions like when he called her on the phone earlier — "You won't bother me anymore. We'll never see you again. No more phone calls." — but he just takes the cash which is in a bag and walks away.

McGarrett arrives at the park and spots Kwon, whom he chases. Kwon suddenly has a gun which he fires. But where did this come from? When Joan was leaving her house, she was unable to find a gun that Gary had passed on to her via Nancy … was it stolen from the house by Kwon or given to him by Annie? Kwon is eventually overpowered. But the show is not over yet and leads to a hideous finale.

McGarrett comes forth with the usual all-encompassing summation of the crime which tells everything exactly as it happened. How he figured this out is a good question, but then he is McGarrett:

"Looks like Kwon didn't have anybody telling him what to do after all. He had all the imagination he needed. He had all the help he needed. A partner. A very bright young lady. She was refused something she wanted, to go off to the mainland with her boyfriend, so she went about it another way. She'd get the money and she'd get the revenge as well. An angry and confused young lady. Who are you talking about? Your daughter. Annie. She's probably here right now in this park, where she's gonna meet Kwon for her share of the money. That's gratitude, huh? For bringing up a child in the lap of luxury, is it?"

Annie then appears, accompanied by simplistic, childish music (shades of Alex North's score to the movie The Bad Seed, also about an evil child), and McGarrett screams at her, "You just walked by your mother!" The kid tells McGarrett, "I almost got away with it. You must admit, Mr. McGarrett, it was a clever plan," and denounces her parents to their faces: "When other kids were in a playground, I was in a courtroom. You've had you both together [sic]. You thought you were giving me love, but it was only making amends so you could feel better. One at a time. Each in his turn."

In response, McGarrett gives her some stern words: "Stop it, Annie. Stop lying to them, stop lying to yourself. That's a cop-out. A lot of kids come from broken homes far worse than yours. The father is gone, the mother is struggling, scrimping. No money in the house, no time for love. They don't all fail. They don't all indulge in anger and self-pity. They don't all turn to crime. Now, stop it and face it."

Annie breaks down and momentarily reconciles with her mother and father, but McGarrett tells Carew to book the kid, saying that her fate is up to the family court, despite Joan saying she won't press charges. The show ends with McGarrett muttering "Sorry ... I'm sorry..." to Gary.

This could have been a good "contemporary issues" show (divorce and its effect on kids), but — alas — it degenerates into another twelfth season mess with the above speechifying.

Kurtzman's character is not well developed, and the actress is not particularly convincing. When Kwon phones her mother, telling her to go to the bank and take out the money, Annie tells the mother in a monotonous manner, "Give it to him. I'll be all right. Just get him out of our lives." When Joan asks Annie, "Do you think we'll ever really be finished with him?" her daughter replies (also monotonously), "Yes, Mother, I do." Kurtzman's character looks very young (the actress was around 14 when the show was filmed) and the episode would have been a lot better if the daughter was a rebellious older teenager instead of a young, spoiled brat type.

The score by Don Ray, which is so-so, momentarily quotes the Five-O theme at one point, a rarity for later-season episodes, as well as the "trombone interval" theme.

CASUALTY LIST: “

    "Death": Joan Carter shoots Robert Kwon in her home with blanks, death is faked, sets events in motion.
    Injury: Kwon's face is scratched by Joan.

MORE TRIVIA:

  • After Joan goes to Sea Life Park near the end of the show, Annie is still at home. When McGarrett arrives and drives up the driveway, for a fraction of a second it looks like there is a car parked at the top, but there is nothing there when we see his car at the top a few seconds later. Annie is holding a popcorn box with the park's name on it (spelled "Sealife Park"). In a shot of Annie from behind, she is holding the box so that you can see it above her left shoulder, but in a subsequent angle of her from the front, she has both hands at her side, presumably holding the box in front of her. However, at one point, she lifts up her left hand so you can see it. In the next view from behind her, the box is again up above her left shoulder. Annie is seen eating from this popcorn box when she meets with Kwon at the park, when she is at home after this, and also at the end of the show (is this always the same box of popcorn?).
  • When he talks to Annie at the beginning of the show, McGarrett tells her, "You're a big girl now, aren't you ... a pretty one too. Lots of boyfriends, I bet."
  • When Joan talks to McGarrett about the birds, the music has weird violin harmonics, which are brought back during the final scene with Annie.
  • McGarrett tells Kimo that he wants to take a run on the beach after he goes home. I really get the feeling that William Smith would like his character to be doing things other than checking out pet shops in this show.
  • Joan puts a bag from a grocery store on the table in her kitchen. On the bag is printed some offer that if you bring the bag back to the store, you will save 3 cents on your next food order. An ecology-minded store ahead of its time?
  • McGarrett wears his blue leisure suit.
  • Joan's house number is 526. The driveway to her house is very steep, which requires McGarrett to drive up it relatively slowly. Fred Helfing tracked down the location to 526 Ahina Street (swing left to see it).
  • The school where Joan drops Annie off is currently the Hawaii School for the Deaf and the Blind at 3445-3465 Kanaina Avenue. The place where Kwon is getting his car fixed, supposedly across the street from the school, is at 3084 Monsarrat Avenue, several blocks away. When Annie gets out of the car and Kwon is seen in the background, the background is at this second location. Joan starts up and turns left, which is still in front of the school with the "no trespassing sign" in the background, but then as she drives into the car repair place and runs into the back of some guy's car, that is at the second location. Thanks to Fred for figuring this out.
  • When Carew and Lori are leaving the office in the first act, Kimo intentionally hits Lori on her chest with his notebook!
  • A crowd is seen watching the big confrontation with McGarrett, Annie and her parents at the end of the show.
  • The daughter's name is Annie when spoken throughout the show, but "Anne" in the end credits.

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266. (S12E07) Use A Gun, Go To Hell ★★½  BOOK HIM 

Original air date: 11/29/79 — Opening CreditsEnd Credits
Director: Ed Abroms; Producers: Andrew Gottlieb (Hollywood), William F. Phillips (Hawaii); Writer: Sam Roeca; Music: Bruce Broughton
Timings: Teaser: 0:32; Main Titles: 0:58; Act One: 17:16; Act Two: 8:42; Act Three: 12:21; Act Four: 9:26; End Credits: 0:39; Total Time: 49:54.

QUICK PLOT:

Five-O follows the trail of pain and death left by a handgun, hoping to recover it before it can wreak more havoc.

Click here to read Full Plot.

REVIEW:

This is not a "gun goes from one person to another" episode like S07E23, Diary of a Gun. Instead, it is the story of a moron who finds a gun which is then used by him and others to injure or kill several people.

This gun is a German HK (Heckler and Koch) 9mm automatic which belonged to Roger Bancroft (Andrew Duggan in his final Five-O appearance). Bancroft's occupation is not stated anywhere, but he seems very well-off, because he lives in a large house at 6501 Pahana Street, Honolulu, above some cliffs near the ocean and next to a trail down to the beach. Bancroft, who has a large collection of firearms, is very much opposed to gun control, saying he "can't get police protection," though you have to wonder what he needs protection from.

Rolly (Paul Koslo), a blonde surfer type, is the moron with the gun, and with his equally moronic pal Tanami (Richard Dimitri, star of last season's "Number One With A Bullet") robs small businesses for cash. At the beginning of the show Tanami borrows the gun to threaten Sunada (Harry Chang), the owner of a bakery. Sunada fights back with a knife, stabbing Tanami, but for his efforts, Sunada ends up shot. Tanami tries to escape, but collapses in the parking lot outside and is left for dead by Rolly, who takes his gun back.

Rolly and his girlfriend Penelope ("Perky") Rogers (Nicole Ericson) leave the scene quickly in his car, a dilapidated Ford Galaxie. Perky's driving the car is erratic — it looks like the actress wasn't used to driving a car with power steering. They are pulled over by a cop named R. Sunada (Philip Sunada), same names as the bakery owner, but not before Rolly throws the gun onto a nearby beach among some rocks. Despite the fact that Perky doesn't have her driver's license on her, the cop lets her off with just a warning!

Rolly comes back later to find the gun and is horrified to see some little boy named Taki (Damien Kaha'Ulelio) has found it and, thinking it is a toy, shoots his sister Lana who he's playing with. Rolly leaves the scene. The girl's injuries are serious, but not fatal. After she is taken to the hospital, the doctor tells her mother, Mrs. Akalo (Cha Thompson) that her daughter will survive. Rolly later returns to the beach. He looks for and finds the gun which Taki put in a garbage can.

Meanwhile, Tanami, along with Sunada, has been taken to the hospital. The bullet which hit Sunada has been determined to be identical to one from a gun used to assassinate Hawaiian Senator Kurusu six weeks before. As Carew discovers when he goes to see Bancroft, Kurusu was Bancroft's next-door neighbor. It is not established how it is known that the bullet is connected specifically to the gun stolen from Bancroft's place.

Kurusu and Bancroft were "violent political enemies" because of "the gun control law he was gonna introduce," evidence of "Kurusu's whole mentality — government regulation, interference in a citizen's private rights, the worst disease afflicting contemporary society."

Lori interviews Sunada in the hospital, who complains to her like he did to the media after the shooting that Tanami is treated better by the cops than he is: "I have to pay hospital bills, hire an attorney, while this thief gets everything free at the public trough." Duke also interviews Tanami in the hospital. He laughs when Duke tries to connect him to the murder of Kurusu.

Later, after Tanami gets out of the hospital, Duke tails him to Rolly's place where Rolly tells Tanami how he got hold of the gun: "I got a glimpse of the guy that used that thing, man … I was sleeping off some beer down on the rocks and the dogs were barking, man. And I look up where all the fat cats are living up on the cliff. And all of a sudden, this dude runs through his backyard and throws that HK, not 20 feet from where I am." It was maybe not a good idea of Duke to mention the Kurusu case in the hospital, because Tanami gets grandiose ideas about blackmailing the gun's owner. Rolly and Tanami start horsing around, but when Rolly tries to take the gun back from Tanami, who has stuck it in the bandages from his wound, Tanami gets shot dead.

Remembering what Tanami said, Rolly goes to Bancroft's place, though you have to wonder how he could be so specific as to which house at the top of the cliff was connected with the gun, given his hung-over condition when he recovered it, not to mention how he knew the gun was an HK, which is a relatively rare item. He snoops in Bancroft's mailbox to find out Bancroft's name on one of the letters from a J.T. Printing on Kanaka Avenue, Honolulu, HI 96816, which doesn't sound like it is too far from Bancroft's house, based on its ZIP code — 96815.

Because an APB was put out based on Duke's description of Rolly's car, a couple of patrol cops see the car outside Bancroft's. For some reason I can't understand, Rolly has gone down the surfers' trail and is trying to climb up the very steep cliff behind Bancroft's when one of the cops, pointing a gun in his direction, tells him to freeze. Instead, Rolly runs like hell away from the cop, all the way back to Perky's place, which is probably very far away. When he gets there, he turns on her multi-band radio (??) which gives him a broadcast from HPD saying they are looking for him.

Using the address he got from the letter in Bancroft's mailbox, Rolly looks up Bancroft's number in the telephone book, which seems very odd considering how security-conscious Bancroft is –- wouldn't he have an unlisted number? And why would Bancroft have an unlocked mailbox which people can snoop in?

Rolly tells Bancroft to meet him at "Lookout Point, Tantalus Drive" with $50,000 to get the gun back. Rolly changes his hair color to brown using some dye he finds on the bathroom sink. He is so paranoid about people outside Perky's place based on the noise they are making that when she comes home, he shoots her dead as she walks in the front door.

Rolly leaves and takes Perky's blue Volkswagen convertible to go to Lookout Point, which is on a mountain above Honolulu, but another APB has been put out for the VW and it has been seen from the air by a police helicopter, who alert McGarrett and Carew on the ground that it is near "Poinsettia approaching Skyline Drive" which is a viewpoint near the ocean.

Bancroft is not there, but Bancroft's son Elliott (Jack Stauffer) is. Rolly has a weird Hallowe'en devil mask to disguise himself. Where did he get this from? After Elliott tells Rolly that he was listening on another line to Rolly's conversation extorting money from his father, Rolly realizes that it was actually Elliott who killed Kurusu. Giving Elliott the gun in exchange for the cash, Rolly says, "Now get rid of it right this time. I don't want it traced back to me either. And don't throw it just anywhere for somebody to find it. Dismantle it. And throw it in the pearly deep. You got that?"

McGarrett and Carew come upon Rolly just as he is leaving the viewpoint, and after a chase, he is busted and spills the beans about what happened with the gun after McGarrett tells him "We have enough charges against you to glut the courts for the next 15 years." The two from Five-O go to Bancroft's place where Elliott, who has previously come across as a son who is seriously "whipped" by his father, has just given his old man some mouth in response to a query about what he has just been up to. Bancroft says words to the effect that his son finally has some balls and offers him a drink of whiskey!

As the two cops confront Elliott, he tells his dad, "You told me the next time you saw Kurusu, you'd kill him. So I thought I'd do you a favor and take the credit." He runs away to the room where the ammunition for the guns is kept and tries to reload the HK and kill himself. McGarrett, not putting himself in harm's way, orders Carew to break the door down, which he does and overpowers Elliott, who is led from the room whimpering. But then Bancroft himself takes the gun and points it at McGarrett, saying, "You're not taking him. You can't do this … He couldn't have known what he was doing."

McGarrett has already uttered anti-gun statements during the show. He talks of the "fifty to sixty million of [the guns] out there, owned by a nation of handgun lovers. And every one of them capable of death and destruction." To the mother of the little girl shot by her brother, he says "The guns are out there everywhere and all the pointless pain and suffering could be prevented."

But this is nothing compared to McGarrett's final rant in response to Bancroft saying in regard to his son, "It was a mistake. This will destroy him":

"If anything will destroy him, it's what you're holding. They're always so, so handy, aren't they? So within reach. Do you realize that that gun has killed a state senator, a young man looking for some way to be a big man, a pretty young woman, who never knew what happened? It almost paralyzed a little girl, and just now, your son tried to kill himself with it. Please don't give me that old cliché that 'Guns don't kill people, that only people kill people' That's nonsense. Absolute nonsense. If there were no handguns available out there, a hell of a lot of innocent people would still be alive. What is this love affair? What is this fascination that Americans have for guns? It happens nowhere else in the world. When and where do the rights of you gun lovers stop and the rights of the public for protection of life and limb begin? Answer me that. Now, look at yourself, a rational man holding a weapon of death, fully loaded, on a police officer. Please, let's not... Let's not do any more damage, Mr. Bancroft. Give me the gun."

Bancroft gives McGarrett the gun and the show is over.

This show must have been a favorite of Jack Lord's, because he was reportedly very much against handguns –- no wonder there are these huge attacks of speechifying. For a twelfth season episode, this one is a bit above average despite its faults. It has a score by Bruce Broughton, including some exciting chase sequences, which makes you appreciate a composer who knows the show and knows what he is doing. As well, William Smith as Kimo gives a performance where he is very interested in the proceedings.

However, the character of Elliott, Bancroft's son, is not well-developed. His father nags him to shut up and let him do the talking when being interviewed by Carew, but we don't really get the sense that this kid is so brow-beaten that he would commit a murder as a result. Elliott also has a lot of friends who hang out at his father's place. You would think if his father was so controlling, Elliott wouldn't have any friends allowed at the place at all.

After Elliott murdered Kurusu, he threw the gun over the cliff behind his house, where Rolly found it. This was a pretty dumb move on Elliott's part, since it was quite likely that someone would find it there and if the cops got hold of it, it would be quickly identified it as his father's, especially since it was a relatively unusual firearm, with likely no more than half a dozen in Honolulu (which seems like "quite a lot" to me), according to Carew.

CASUALTY LIST:

    Injury: Tanami stabbed by Sunada during attempted robbery.
    Injury: Sunada shot by Tanami during attempted robbery.
    Injury: Lana shot by her brother, Taki.
    Death: Tanami shot as he and Rolly horse around with the gun.
    Death: Perky shot by Rolly.

MORE TRIVIA:

  • After the robbery at Sunada's, Rolly and Perky drive through an area that looks like the mall where McGarrett got his hair cut in an earlier show, passing Hawaii Kai Auto Parts before they turn on to the street.
  • Although Sunada's place is a bakery with one menu showing things like turnovers, curry chicken (50¢), apple and coconut (something) (40¢), and apple dumpling (35¢), plus pop for 30¢/40¢/55¢ (depending on size, including Sprite which is not crossed out), another menu shows Chinese food like chow men, beansprout fun, chicken or beef curry and broccoli (various prices between $1.65 and $2.55). A sign on a door for the place advertises Chinese style roast pork, char siu and roast duck.
  • McGarrett is in such a hurry to leave his office with Kimo to pursue Rolly, who has been spotted by HPD, that he drops the phone, which falls not on the receiver, but on the floor.
  • There are two lab technicians previously unseen on the show doing forensics on the bullets and shells, a white guy named Keoni (Kevin O'Connor) and an Asian one called Monty (uncredited).
  • A sign in Rolly's room reads "Girls Topless Girls." Inside Perky's place is a sign saying "Support the Civic Purity League."
  • Rolly uses the expression "Hey, bro" twice, rather than the correct "Hey, brah."
  • Nicole Erickson does a much better job acting briefly in this episode than she did in season eleven's "The Case Against Philip Christie."
  • When Carew (William Smith) is in the hospital with McGarrett, "Dr. Smith" is paged to call Nuclear Medicine.
  • Bancroft's place is protected by Pointsettia [sic] Security Systems, 808-555-6889.
  • When Tanami is discharged from the hospital, he takes the Kalihi Uka bus to Rolly's place.

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267. (S12E08) Voice Of Terror

Original air date: 12/4/79 — Opening CreditsEnd Credits
Director: Beau van den Ecker; Producers: Andrew Gottlieb (Hollywood), William F. Phillips (Hawaii); Writer: Frank Telford; Music: Michael Isaacson
Timings: Teaser: 0:32; Main Titles: 0:58; Act One: 13:52; Act Two: 12:25; Act Three: 9:24; Act Four: 12:04; End Credits: 0:39; Total Time: 49:54.

QUICK PLOT:

McGarrett has to deal with a pair of political terrorists threatening to kill a policewoman they have taken hostage unless their demands are met.

Click here to read Full Plot.

REVIEW:

This episode was written by Frank Telford, who gave us some other gems like "Though The Heavens Fall," "Good Help Is Hard To Find," "School for Assassins," and "Woe To Wo Fat," all in the twelfth season. "Journey Out Of Limbo" from the fifth season, on the other hand, was O.K.

This is the worst show featuring Five-O's own brand of radical types who are pissed off at the establishment in one way or another. In this case, the group is the "World Liberation Army," who have connections to the mid-East and Germany. Among their accomplishments are blowing up a school bus, killing 27 children. This sounds like a very serious organization similar to the Baader–Meinhof Gang (a.k.a. Red Army Faction) in Germany in the 1970s. But one has to seriously wonder about the "terrorists" in this show when at the beginning they are seen driving around in a worse-for-wear Cadillac DeVille, making banal statements like "solidarity forever, brothers."

You also have to wonder why this "army" is in Hawaii at all. There are only three members seen in the show: Karl (as in "Marx," played by Carl Bellini), Willa (Anne Zimmelman, an attractive actress with a resemblance to stock player Luella Costello; this is her only acting credit listed at IMDb) and Mark (Kaz Garas, who we have seen in S01E06, "Twenty-Four Karat Kill," and S02E13, "The Joker's Wild, Man, Wild"). There are two other members of the organization currently in a Honolulu jail — Stephan and Gino, who were found guilty on six counts of bank robbery and conspiracy, but offered no defense on the alleged grounds that "the court was an illegal arm of a corrupt establishment."

At the beginning of the show, we see the three active members digging up some rifles and pistols which were buried at a beach. There is already dissension when Karl announces intentions to take over a local radio station so they will "become international celebrities with a network at our command to speak to the world." Mark refers to Karl behind his back as "our great leader" and to his face accuses him of being an egomaniac who will become an "international celebrity" at the expense of the other members of the group.

Soon after this, the three are pursued by two HPD patrol cops, Tom Kellogg (Danny Kamekona) and Sally Dean, a rookie still on probation (Mary Angela), over some minor traffic infraction. The chase ends up on what looks like a highway under construction where there are virtually no other vehicles to be seen, as happens in some other episodes. A gun battle leaves Mark (abandoned because Karl says he is "all busted up") and Kellogg (assumed to be dead, but later determined to be in "critical condition") lying on the road. Mary Dean is kidnapped and taken to a middle-of-nowhere single-lane road on Koko Head above Hanauma Bay, which we have also seen in other shows.

Karl figures that he will take advantage of the police radio to broadcast his demands to the world instead of a radio station. After announcing to the police dispatch center, "We have commandeered your cop car and captured your little girly pig. Now, if any other pig unit bothers us, we'll blow her away," he wants to speak to the "head pig," and the cop standing behind the dispatcher immediately says "Get Five-O." McGarrett is the one who is delegated to deal with the situation, instead of someone from HPD like the police chief. Karl wants a radio network he can use to "address the nation," plus food and water, as well as the release of their "illegally imprisoned" two comrades in jail and a jet plane to fly them all out of the country. McGarrett says all this will take time but Karl tells him, "You're deliberately goading me." When McGarrett says that getting the jet in particular "would really be complicated," Karl says, "Complicated? Bull."

McGarrett goes to see the Governor, who says "Our ability to maintain law and order is at stake." Describing Karl as "a hardened terrorist, a pro, a killer" who also holds Sally's life in his hands, McGarrett wants to "stall, delay, negotiate, every inch of the way" until nightfall, then send in the troops. But the Governor, telling him "we can't sit still any longer," orders McGarrett to "do something positive ... to at least try to win." McGarrett returns to the base of the hill where the terrorists are holed up and a large Winnebago-style HPD van full of equipment is waiting for him.

As the screaming, psychotic Karl, Cal Bellini gives a ridiculous, scenery-chewing performance. He slaps Sally around, saying "I'm not a sadist and I don't particularly enjoy torture," theatening to break her fingers. When he wants Sally to speak in favor of their cause over the police radio which is finally patched through to the local radio station, she turns to him and yells, "You can drop dead, you murderous punk!" He belts her in the face with the radio handset. Karl screaming to McGarrett over the radio gets more and more hysterical in tone, sounding like James Cagney in the film "White Heat," including the expression "We're on top of the world!"

Despite what the Governor told him, McGarrett's technique for dealing with the hostage taking is to prolong it as long as possible, which is something that could be said about this show in a major way. The constant give-and-take between McGarrett and Karl, with McGarrett constantly threatening to terminate their radio conversation and letting someone else do the negotiating, becomes very tiresome after a while.

Truck and a cop named Harmon (Fred Lerner) are assigned to approach Karl from the rear, acting like hikers. They attempt to release some invisible gas which "affects the central nervous system" to knock out the terrorists, but it scatters in the wind. As they approach the car, Harmon tries to use a stun grenade, but totally screws this up, with the result that he is shot and dies of his injuries later after he is taken down from the hill on a stretcher by two cops dressed only in their underpants. Truck is shot in the arm and handcuffed to the front of the police car. Hearing about Harmon, the Governor apologizes to McGarrett, saying his order to resolve the situation quickly was what caused Harmon's death, adding, "I leave it all in your hands, Steve."

McGarrett is at his wits end, especially since Karl knows what he is doing: "waiting for darkness." Mark, who was left during the police shootout earlier, but has been requested to accompany Stephan and Gino as part of the trade, is brought to the base camp, seemingly without his two comrades. He tells McGarrett that "Karl has botched up this operation from the beginning," and he has no intention of joining Karl, who has "put his bloated ego above our revolutionary goals."

But McGarrett threatens Mark that he will play a police-taped phone conversation that he obtained via Duke where Mark was the one who ratted out Stephan and Gino over the radio so Karl can hear it. The same kind of push/pull that's been going on between McGarrett and Karl now continues between McGarrett and Mark, who says that Karl is a "psycho" and "paranoid," and it is hinted that Mark has hot pants for Willa, and the two of them wanted to team up and turn Karl into a "non-person." Members of the "army" were eating at a local restaurant called Ronny's but Karl left the place before the cops arrived and they arrested Stephan and Gino. The way this is all explained is very confusing, especially the suggestion by McGarrett that Marc and Willa were also at the restaurant (and obviously they left early as well).

McGarrett gets Mark to reveal a "recognition signal" that will convince Karl that Mark is coming up the hill with the other two. McGarrett then pretends to be Mark, walking up the hill wearing Mark's clothes, with two cops pretending to be Stephan and Gino. It's completely unbelievable that Karl and Willa cannot see through this! Karl drops his guard after "Mark" gives the signal, and Truck throws some dirt in Karl's face. Karl is shot dead and Willa is quickly persuaded not to knock off Sally by Truck and McGarrett.

At the end of the show, McGarrett tells Sally "I'm very proud of you" as he carries her away, in a scene reminiscent of Tarzan and Jane.

The music by Michael Isaacson (his only score for the series), which has military overtones at the beginning when the terrorists are at the beach (sounding a bit like Jerry Fielding, as do other sections of the music) tries a bit too hard to make a point including a sweet-sounding finale, but is generally good. Isaacson had kind of limited career in film and television, providing the score to 13 episodes of "Rich Man, Poor Man," and one episode of "The Bionic Woman" in addition to being orchestrator for several other productions.

CASUALTY LIST:

    Injury: Mark falls out of car after Cadillac forced off road by HPD Officer Tom Kellogg.
    Injury: Kellogg shot by Karl.
    Injury (x2): HPD Officer Sally Dean hit in the face by broken glass shot out by Karl. He then punches her in the face.
    Injury: Sally punched in face by Karl with radio handset when she doesn’t cooperate during broadcast.
    Death: HPD Officer Harmon shot by Karl. Looks like he will survive, but dies before getting to the bottom of Koko Head.
    Injury (x2): Truck shot in the shoulder by Willa, then punched by Karl.
    Death: Karl shot three times by McGarrett.

MORE TRIVIA:

  • Here is Karl's crazy speech, once he gets the radio hookup he wants: "My name is Karl. I speak for the World Liberation Army. I speak to friends of freedom everywhere in the world, so my voice is your voice. We have demanded that the corrupt establishment grant us our rights and our due, but it has refused. The whole rotten establishment is tottering and on the verge of collapse. So the time for demands is past, and the time for violence is here. Rise up, rise together, and the World Liberation Army will lead you. Join us in our acts of sabotage and rebellion. Blow up their storage tanks. Assault their banks. Terrorize their streets. And never forget, they fear only one thing: Violence. So let us worship it. Let us use violence as our god, our sense, our power, our instrument of redress, our wrongs, for violence, violence, violence!" This really gives Don Knight's speech in "The Kahuna" later this season a run for the money.
  • Speaking of "The Kahuna," the company that owns the island in that episode is Trans-Allied Shipping Industries. In this show, there is a radio broadcast heard in the background which mentions a court case involving a company called Trans-Allied Merchandising: The president of this company said "the outcome of the investigation is, quote: 'What I have always said it would be.' Under oath, he was unaware of any illegal incursion in Trans-Allied Merchandising while he was [president?]. [An] informant said the merchandise was stolen by company employees, then sold to local Portuguese crime lords."
  • The word "pig" in one form or another is only heard 10 times during the show; it seems like many more.
  • The license number on the cop car that Karl commandeers changes from 8B-5002 during the shootout near the beginning to 8B-5001 when Truck is chained to it near the end.
  • When McGarrett finally gets to talk to Sally via the police radio, he says "Hi, honey." At the end, when Truck is about to shoot Willa, McGarrett tells her "He means it, honey."
  • Karl tells McGarrett that once Stephen, Gino and Mark come up the hill, he will drive them and Willa in the cop car with Sally and Truck still as hostages to the airport. He says "I know it'll be crowded, but we'll manage."
  • On his way to the hill, Karl goes to a hardware store where he makes a scene over getting a portable radio so he can monitor the broadcast to the world he is going to be making. Next door to this place is a another store called "Liquors Quicker."
  • When she thinks the "army" members in the Cadillac look suspicious, Sally addresses her partner as "Dick," but his name is "Tom" in the end credits.
  • Duke inserts the tape of Mark's phone call into a Technics cassette player.
  • A City and County Ambulance is seen at the scene at the base of Koko Head.
  • The Governor looks very old and tired.
  • I think the reason that Anne Zimmelman looks like Luella Costello is because she is Luella Costello! If you search for Anne Zimmelman at Google, you will find a reference to Luella Anne Zimmelman, and the name "Luella" is not that common. As well, some of the snoopy information you can find out with Google suggests this person was born around 1950, which ties in with the age this actress might be.

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268. (S12E09) A Shallow Grave ★★  KIMO, BOOK THEM 

Original air date: 12/11/79 — Opening CreditsEnd Credits
Director: Dennis Donnelly; Producers: Andrew Gottlieb (Hollywood), William F. Phillips (Hawaii); Writers: Robert & Esther Mitchell; Music: Don Ray
Timings: Teaser: 0:32; Main Titles: 0:58; Act One: 12:55; Act Two: 10:00; Act Three: 10:20; Act Four: 14:28; End Credits: 0:39; Total Time: 49:52.

QUICK PLOT:

A young man from the mainland who has returned to Hawaii is overwhelmed by visions that are connected to a crime that took place 20 years ago.

Click here to read Full Plot.

REVIEW:

University student Mike Harper (John David Carson) comes to Hawaii from Danbury, Connecticut and he keeps seeing peculiar visions involving mannequin parts floating in space as well as images of Phil Coleman (John Ireland), one of the participants in a $2 million Honolulu jewel robbery which happened 20 years before. The slightest thing can trigger these visions, even the hand of a Hawaiian girl who welcomes Harper after he arrives at the Ilikai Hotel where he is staying.

It is an interesting coincidence that just around the time Harper comes to Hawaii, Coleman is being released from prison, having finished his full 20 year sentence, which "he could have shortened," except he wouldn't cooperate, according to one of the reporters waiting to ask him questions. Harper is in the crowd watching as Coleman is driven away from jail by his old friend Jake Cochran (John Zenda), who is giving Coleman his job back working in the Moonfire bar.

Interestingly, the Governor was the district attorney who prosecuted the Coleman case way back when. Because Coleman's accomplice Rick Miller, though supposedly wounded and left to die with the stolen rubies and pearls, completely disappeared, the Governor figures that Miller, if he is still alive, will try and get together with Coleman now and he wants Five-O to prove this theory.

Mike has more flashbacks of Coleman and mannequins when he goes to read back issues of newspapers which have articles about the crime and Coleman's trial, as well as when he is tracking down the shed where Coleman reportedly left Rick Miller after the robbery. This shed is on the property of the Tarnows, Nora (Pat[ricia] Herman) and her husband John (Bill Edwards). Edwards played Pentagon bigshot Jonathan Kaye in eleven previous episodes — his changing roles like this is kind of jarring, aside from the fact his performance as Tarnow is very bad.

Harper arrives at this shed just as Carew is talking to the Tarnows on McGarrett's orders to review certain aspects of the old case. Having finished, Carew runs into Mike, who says, "I remember this place. It's real strange, but I felt pulled here." When Mike says that Miller was in the shed, which the Tarnows just told Carew was "padlocked," Kimo tells Mike to come with him back to Five-O headquarters. When Mike talks to McGarrett there, he says his visions show Coleman in the rain with the rain dripping off his leather cap, something which Coleman wore but a detail about the case which was never released to the public. Kimo in this scene is particularly stupefying — he admits he doesn't know what "déjà vu" means.

On Carew's recommendation, Mike goes back to the Ilikai to rest, but he cannot sleep. Instead he goes to the bar where Coleman is now working and addresses him as "Buzz," a nickname that only Rick Miller knew. Coleman almost flies off the handle but is restrained by Walter Omori, the "mysterious actor" from previous shows who also works in this place as a bartender or waiter.

Meanwhile, Lori goes to Kamehameha University to meet with Dr. Ramsey (Linda Ryan, in her last Five-O appearance), a psychiatrist who works in the areas of "parapsychology, occult phenomena and so on." Ramsey suggests they should try "regression" with Rick where someone is induced to go back in time, even back into the womb and previous lives. (It is interesting that Carew knows who Ramsey is … how long has he been working for Five-O?)

Around this time, a woman tourist (Jo Pruden) is taking photos at the War Memorial Natatorium of nothing particularly interesting, accompanied by banal music by Don Ray. She hears a couple of men arguing and when she goes to check up on this, she finds someone dead. Now, we know from the voice of one of the men and what he was talking about (not to mention that in the subtitles he is identified thus: COLEMAN: "I waited 20 years in the slam. Do you think I'd make a deal?") that this dead guy is Coleman. The woman utters a particularly horrifying scream.

However, we only partially see the dead guy's body, and McGarrett does not say this is Coleman, so if you are not watching with the subtitles on, you might be confused. In any case, so much for John Ireland, probably one of the shortest "special guest star" performances of the entire series, rivalling the episode of the Five-O reboot where Patty Duke, Peter Fonda and Don Stroud appeared for 2:26, 1:37 and 1:51 respectively. (I am not taking Ireland's appearances in the flashbacks into consideration, though.)

After this, McGarrett and Duke go to see Cochran, the bar owner, and ask him about the recent incident where Coleman got annoyed when Mike came to see him. McGarrett doesn't mention anywhere that Coleman is dead, by the way. In fact, McGarrett acts like kind of a jerk, suggesting there is something fishy about Cochran hiring Coleman, saying "The fact that he probably knew where a fortune in jewels was hidden didn't influence you in any way?" Cochran denies this, and looks pissed after the two from Five-O leave. McGarrett orders Mike to be picked up on suspicion of murdering Coleman, which seems extreme.

That afternoon, Mike is taken to Dr. Ramsey's office where he gets some medicine via intravenous and Ramsey starts to "regress" him to his fifteenth, tenth and his fifth birthdays as a reel-to-reel tape recorder with 10″ reels records what he is saying. The music during this hypnosis-like treatment is again banal, incorporating the children's song "This Old Man," not to mention the "trombone interval" theme which is used to excess in the show, especially during its teaser. Ramsey tries to go even further back into Mike's childhood, but he totally freaks out — his heart stops and he has to be revived with a shot of adrenaline. Mike's mother (Electra Gailas) arrives as he is recovering from this trauma, having been brought to Hawaii at Ramsey's suggestion and picked up at the airport by Lori.

There are a lot of unanswered questions about what has happened, with words like "reincarnation," "voodoo," and "anaphylactic shock" being thrown around in a room where everyone is meeting next to the one where Mike was being grilled while under sedation. Ramsey even suggests Mike "may have been trying to please the doctor, you know, subconsciously, telling me what he thought I wanted to hear." After being led on for over 36 minutes, we finally get a huge jaw-dropping clue to Mike's past when his mother tells the assembled, "Mike is not our natural child. We adopted him when he was 3 years old."

When Mrs. Harper says that the "Children's Home in Chicago" may have information about Mike's early life, McGarrett, who has been barking "do this/do that" commands to Lori for the entire show tells her to call these people and make inquiries. Despite what you would expect to be serious resistance from the home to someone making inquiries about an adopted child, Lori returns almost immediately and says, "The Chicago home said that he was vacationing with his parents that summer [Meaning what? The summer of the crime?] on this island. A couple of months later, his parents were killed in an automobile accident." DUH!

In the other room, Mike wakes up and escapes from the hospital, taking the brown Toyota Corolla of Ramsey's secretary where she left the keys in the ignition. He goes to the Tarnows' place again where he wants to get into the shed. Nora Tarnow approaches him and asks him brusquely, "What do you want? Are you connected with Phil Coleman in some way?" Rick says he was inside the shed years ago, and Nora opens it up with a key which is hanging hidden nearby beside the shed's door. Inside are a whole bunch of mannequin parts because, as Nora explains, "My husband and I used to be in the business. Made them for the department stores and dress manufacturers in the islands."

Mike freaks out big time because of the mannequins, then recalls seeing Coleman digging nearby in the ground beside a mixing tub used for concrete which is still there, years later. Mike starts digging in the same place with his hands and Nora threatens to hit him with a piece of wood just as Five-O and HPD pull up. John Tarnow, who has been standing around looking clueless, runs into his house, but he and his wife are soon grabbed by the cops.

There are two shovels nearby, which McGarrett commands two of the HPD men to take and start digging, continuing what Mike was doing. Nora protests, saying "You can't do this. This is our property. Get off of it, all of you." (Isn't she right, wouldn't McGarrett need a warrant to search?) Soon enough, they find a skull in the ground, a bone and a watch. Mike says that he saw Coleman bury "a little bag in there," and the two cops dig more, though we don't see any further bones connected with the skull which McGarrett says is Rick Miller's, though the Tarnows are keeping their mouths shut. Sure enough, further down, they find a bag containing jewels from the robbery.

In case you are thinking that it was Coleman who buried Miller, Nora says "Twenty years of not living. Of not doing anything while we searched every inch of this lousy place looking for that little bag of jewels, and they were down there all the time. Under the body. The one place we'd never look." McGarrett cleverly suggests, "But the one most logical place to hide both the jewels and the body is in the freshly tilled earth of a garden. Soft, easy to dig, and most important, where no one would notice nor think of looking." Nora turns to her husband and says, "We could have had them all this time if you had only dug the grave deeper. [Thus the title of the episode.] Just a few inches deeper." Meaning it was John Tarnow who buried Rick Miller … but did he kill Miller, or was Miller already dead? And why would he have chosen the place which was right above where the jewels were buried? This is an unreal coincidence which is stupid!

This whole show is kind of dumb. The script is mediocre and so is most of the acting. The "déjà vu" blunder by Carew is bad enough, but later when Carew asks "If Rick Miller is alive, couldn't that Harper kid have run into him somewhere and made a deal to take care of Coleman to get a cut?", McGarrett responds, "Sure. But why would he make himself so visible?" Carew is at a loss for words, merely shrugging his shoulders.

McGarrett seems to be often trying to drag Carew into conversations, like where he asks him to finish his "suppose" speculation, saying "Kimo, want to take it from there?" and Carew fleshes out McGarrett's theory that the Tarnows would want to make a deal with Coleman, so when Coleman at the Natatorium said no deal, "he had to be talking to John Tarnow." Tarnow is further IDd as Coleman's killer later near the end of the show when he wants to "handle" Mike who has returned to the property, but Nora tells him, "No, you won't. You've done enough. This time I'll take care of it."

As mentioned earlier, Sharon Farrell's character in this show seems to do little other than carry out orders which McGarrett commands her to do: "Lori, check into Coleman's past. What he did for a living, who he associated with, relatives, friends. If he had any after all those years." (Lori: "Will do."); "Lori, check that personal property list in his [Coleman's] file. Find out what he was wearing the day they picked him up, huh?"; "Ask her [Dr. Ramsey] if she'd be willing to help us in this case." (Lori: "I'll get on it."); "Lori, you said Dr. Ramsey could see him [Mike] at 2:30?" (Lori: "Right.") "Arrange for it please." (Lori: "Okay."); "Lori, call Chicago right away. See if they have anything on Mike Harper."; "Lori, take care of her [Mike's mother, while he and Carew go to the Tarnows]." (Lori to Mrs. Harper: "It's all right. It'll be all right. Don't worry.")

If you look at the production order for the show, this was actually the last episode where Farrell appeared. I have never read anything specific as to why Farrell left the show, i.e., she quit or was fired, either in the interview with her on my site or her salacious autobiography which can be purchased at Amazon in paperback or as a Kindle book. No doubt because she is reduced to McGarrett's maid, even worse than people like Kono, Chin Ho and Ben in the "old days," and perhaps because her job was on the line, Farrell really acts like her heart is not in what she is doing, slouching and looking kind of nervous.

The finale of the show is sucky in a Streets of San Francisco fashion, with Mike and his mother thanking everyone for helping him figure out the visions he has been experiencing. With assistance from Dr. Ramsey, the pretty lady he saw is identified as his real mother and he adds, "I also remembered wandering away from my folks that day and hiding in the shed during the rainstorm." Mike receives a check for $10,000 from the Pacific Jewelry Exchange for his help in locating the stolen jewels. As her final act of servitude to McGarrett, Lori gives both Mike and his mother leis with appropriate Hawaiian expressions, likely of farewell. Considering this was Farrell's final show, there is a certain irony to this.

CASUALTY LIST:

    Death: Phil Coleman hit with blunt object, crushing his skull, by John Tarnow.
    Injury: Mike Harper goes into cardiac arrest when recalling memories from his childhood.

MORE TRIVIA:

  • The front pages of two newspapers are seen. The Honolulu Advertiser has a story about Coleman getting out of jail with a large headline: "Coleman To Be Released" and a sub-head "20 Years For Millions In Jewels." Other headlines include "Improvements Complete At Post Office," and "Rough Road Ahead To Save 'NH'." The Bogus Honolulu Daily News identifies Mike as the prime suspect in Coleman's murder with a large headline "Phil Coleman Murdered: Prime Suspect Held" with a picture of Mike, but where did they get this picture? He was just picked up for suspicion of murder, but was he booked for it? After he assures McGarrett that he didn't kill Coleman, he is just let go. Other headlines on this paper's front page are "Political Placards' Removal Is Asked By Zoning Director," "Building-Loan Men To Hold Banquet For Jubilee Date," "Eight Judges Selected For Brotherhood," "Youth Problems Highlight Talks" and "Sunday Talks On Pensions Being Mulled."
  • When we first see Jo Pruden, the tourist, at the Natatorium, she is completely in a shadow which extends far in front of her towards the camera, but in the next shot, there is sunshine hitting her from the right side. A few seconds later, as she looks towards where the men are arguing, she is still in sunshine, but in the next shot, about half of her body is in a shadow.
  • The Tarnows' house has exactly the same antenna on top as it did 20 years ago as well as some other structure nearby. The shed still has the mannequins. Why would they have kept the mannequins, or even the shed itself?
  • The weather during the flashbacks is peculiar — it is raining heavily, but in the background you can see sunshine. However, I have experienced this myself during a trip to Hawaii where there was a ferocious downpour and sunshine at the same time.
  • Coleman and Miller's getaway car, seen 20 years ago in a flashback, is a 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air with the same license plate as McGarrett usually has — F6-3958 (thanks to Bobbi).
  • The neighborhood around the Tarnows seems kind of white trashy, with a bunch of wrecked cars and so forth. You have to wonder, what was the two-year-old (or thereabouts) Mike doing wandering around this neighborhood, since there don't seem to be any other people living nearby — at least now.
  • As Mike is driving his rented car to the Tarnows' place for the first time, the reflection in the front windshield doesn't change, except when he turns a corner. Are they using a process shot?
  • The "bookem" at the end is "Okay, Kimo, book them. Murder one."

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269. (S12E10) The Kahuna BOMB – NO STARS!  KIMO, BOOK HIM 

Original air date: 12/18/79 — Opening CreditsEnd Credits
Director: Robert L. Morrison; Producers: Andrew Gottlieb (Hollywood), William F. Phillips (Hawaii); Writer: James Menzies; Music: Morton Stevens
Timings: Teaser: 0:32; Main Titles: 0:58; Act One: 9:26; Act Two: 12:43; Act Three: 11:39; Act Four: 13:56; End Credits: 0:39; Total Time: 49:53.

QUICK PLOT:

When the State Medical Examiner is denied access to the bodies of two young people who died recently, she turns to Five-O for help investigating the case.

Click here to read Full Plot.

REVIEW:

This episode takes place mostly on a fictional privately-owned island called Lono Bay. It is a couple of hours away from Honolulu by helicopter, though Carew can pick up a pay phone there and say "patch me through to McGarrett" to the operator and be connected within seconds without even giving the phone number. The industry of this island is the Lono Bay Sand and Gravel Company, which is a division of Trans-Allied Shipping Industries.

Cathy Lee Crosby plays State Medical Examiner Dr. Karen Lynch, who calls on the island periodically. During her current visit, she wants to know why two local kids 18 and 21 years old died recently, but finds herself thwarted by burial customs and superstitions as exemplified by the local kahuna (a caretaker of secret or sacred knowledge) who tells her delaying the funeral is "forbidden … kapu." Lynch gets no help from the police who are basically rent-a-cops towing the company line. Doug Mossman, in his last Five-O appearance, plays Lono Bay Chief of Police Kaana who is indifferent to her concerns about holding an autopsy and sends her packing off the island.

Lynch goes back to Honolulu, where she is stonewalled by her employer, the Health Department, as well as the district attorney's office who cannot grant an exhumation petition because there is no evidence that a crime has been committed. In desperation, she goes to Five-O, because "two young kids died within 24 hours [and] somebody has to care enough to help me find out why."

Unfortunately, she makes this plea just as Five-O is involved in another case. This leads into a sub-plot in the show, making me wonder if its 2010 reboot got the idea for their often-used formula of multiple stories-within-a-show from this episode.

Kimo Carew is doing surveillance in the best Five-O tradition outside the Oahu Power Company's experimental lab, talking on the radio to McGarrett with an open car window and not too quietly. A demoted employee of this place named Frank Turley (Fred Lerner), out for revenge against his boss Numura, places a radioactive container in a limousine nearby without even bothering to see if he is being observed. Carew, while he is yapping, is only about 20 feet away from this guy.

Ordered by McGarrett to "take the suspect," Carew and Truck, who is undercover as Numura's chauffeur, take him into custody after the 260-pound Truck knocks the guy to the ground, giving him a "slight concussion." The HPD bomb squad shows up soon to check out the canister containing the radioactive material, but they seem clueless. It takes McGarrett, who also arrives, to prompt them into checking it with a Geiger counter. One of the cops wearing a lead vest holds the container with insulated gloves, but the other holding the counter has bare hands and no protection at all. Opening or closing the top of the canister seems to affect the amount of radiation which is leaking from it.

Later, McGarrett talks to Addison Bower from Trans-Allied on the phone as Lynch, who has returned to the Five-O offices, listens to the conversation. Bower tells McGarrett that the bodies of the two kids were disinterred and buried at sea in the middle of the night. He says, "It's been company policy for over a hundred years not to interfere with the local customs or religion. The deaths were a tragic accident. You can rest assured we'll take steps to prevent its happening again."

McGarrett introduces Lynch to Carew and Truck, and Carew out of nowhere immediately thinks there is something fishy about what happened to the kids' bodies: "A night burial at sea is a pretty neat way to cover up a murder." Even McGarrett has a "WHOA!" moment, commenting, "That's pretty heavy stuff, Carew." Telling Truck, "I'll arrange with your divisional commander to hold you over for another special assignment," he tells the two men to fly back with Lynch to Lono Bay. This comment by McGarrett suggests that Truck, who was an undercover operative borrowed from HPD in the season's first episode, "A Lion In The Streets," where his real name — Mo Kealoha – was mentioned, is still a member of the police force and not yet a member of Five-O. This is later reinforced when Carew says of Truck: "He eats more than the whole HPD put together."

When the two men arrive at Lono Bay with Lynch, the police chief is nowhere to be seen, which is odd, because he previously didn't want her meddling in local affairs. Rather than pretending Carew is someone like her boyfriend, she immediately introduces him to George Lamb (Don Knight), operator of the company general store or "emporium" as "a Five-O officer." Lamb replies with a heavy accent, "Welcome still goes, cobber [Australian slang for 'friend']."

Truck takes on the persona of a travelling salesman, a "discount man," peddling "radios, watches [and] computers … all for sale at discount prices … and all the latest fashions from the mainland: beautiful muumuus for the women." He doesn't seem to actually have much of this merchandise with him, instead consulting a book which looks like a Sears catalogue. While charming some of the local ladies, Truck finds out that Ilima Beach, of all the beaches on the island, is kapu. Of course he goes there to look around, but runs into Paul Kualu, the kahuna (Edward Larry Akau), who is an intimidating guy with a white chin beard which looks pasted on. Truck argues with him, and crosses a line which the kahuna draws in the sand. At the beach, Truck stumbles over a rock, twisting his ankle.

Lynch and Carew go to visit the company doctor, 70-year-old Amos Cooper (Charles Peck), which is also odd, because her questioning his diagnosis that what caused the kids' death was conch shell poisoning was one of the reasons she got kicked off the island earlier. Again, she introduces Carew as someone from Five-O, ignoring the fact that word about this will probably soon spread through the island's tight-knit community. They are interrupted by Kaana who says another kid named Willy Nuna is afflicted with the same kind of poisoning that killed the previous two. When they arrive at Nuna's place, he is dead. Carew says this time the body will be flown to Hawaii for an autopsy.

Truck returns from the beach and chats with some of the local men who hang around Lamb's store. He butters them up with comments about their lifestyle compared to the big city, but then he mentions the island's "pretty strong kapus" and everyone recoils. He tries to get the conversation back on track with a joke, but suddenly he acts like he is having a seizure. As he leaves the store, he is almost fainting. At the place where he, Lynch and Carew are staying, Truck tries to brush off how he is feeling. When he starts talking about the kahuna, calling him "evil" and suggesting he is a possible suspect in the murders of the kids, Carew is disrespectful, asking why Dracula and Frankenstein aren't on the suspect list as well. Carew apologizes for this, using the term "bro" (rather than the correct "bra' ... which he uses wrongly three times in the show).

Truck tells Carew and Lynch, "You know, it seems odd, that couple on Ilima Beach. Three young people died because they disregarded him. Cursed to death, according to the kahuna." I don't know what he is referring to here by "that couple," because he didn't meet anyone when he was at the kapu beach earlier. We see the kahuna generating a curse, and Truck becomes much worse, stumbling around, sweating, and the local people treat him like a leper.

The next day, Carew and Lynch don swim suits and snorkelling equipment and go to the forbidden beach. William Smith is beefy-looking, and Crosby is also pretty shapely. They see a cable which is connected to a cage underwater, but while they are investigating below the surface, someone cuts the cable, and the cage drifts off over the edge of a nearby reef.

Back in Honolulu, the coroner (Winston Char) tells McGarrett that Willy Nuna had "a strong sedative, a root herb called awa [a real substance]" in his bloodstream, but he really died from "toxic shell dust in his lungs … The unusually heavy amount of dust suggests that it might have been deliberately inhaled." As well, his office "found bruises on the interior walls of the trachea." McGarrett speculates: "What if someone gave that boy a drink spiked with this awa root and then, after he passed out, forced a tube down his throat, then injected that poisonous shell dust directly into his lungs? That would certainly explain the bruises on the throat … and a new way to commit murder."

McGarrett soon travels by helicopter to Lono Bay Island, wearing his black leisure suit. There were tire tracks near the place where Carew and Lynch were doing their underwater investigation and the cable was cut, but a rain has wiped these out. McGarrett tells Carew to create a cast of another tire track and then call in all the vehicles which might have produced such a track, with the intention of smoking out who may be responsible for the murders.

When all the Jeeps and similar vehicles on the island are lined up and inspected, Lynch is told that there is one missing — that of George Lamb. When she goes to check out this Jeep, which, unknown to her previously, is inside Lamb's warehouse, he is changing one of its tires and he totally freaks out.

While Don Knight has typically pushed the envelope with his characters in previous episodes of the show, in this show he goes totally off the wall in a scene which must be seen to be believed, threatening Lynch with a gun and touching her in a creepy manner while hysterically blabbing away about having murdered the kids, who were threatening a multi-million dollar coral harvesting operation he was undertaking off the kapu beach. For the benefit of theater students who want a audition speech along the lines of "act completely crazy for two minutes and 20 seconds," here is the whole thing:

    (Lamb tells Lynch at gunpoint) Get in the car. We're going for a little drive. Get in. Come on. Get in. In the car. In. (She gets in the passenger seat.) All this trouble because I thought the rain would take care of the tracks. I found a bed of angel skin coral off Ilima Beach. Do you know what angel skin coral is? (She nods her head "No") Some of the most precious coral in the world. There's a bed of it worth a million dollars out there. (Lynch: Is that why you killed the kids? They discovered your secret?) (He looks incredulous) What else could I do? This modern generation, they wouldn't respect the kahuna's kapu. They wouldn't stay away. (Screaming) What else could I do?! (Lynch: So he's in it with you?) (He doesn't know what she is talking about) Who? Kahuna? Kahuna? (He laughs hysterically) No. No. I was lucky there. He put the kapu on before I found the coral. (Laughs again) (Lynch: I see.) (He looks aside) Technically, the coral belongs to Trans-Allied. (He sneers) They're rich enough. They own everything. The bloody emporium. (Closes his eyes and yells) I've put in 25 years behind that counter. They don't understand. They don't care. They don't... They don't care. Do you know why they call it angel skin? Its color is so much like the color of the skin of a beautiful woman. (He touches her face) Soft, gentle, fragile. Oh, what a bloody waste. (She jerkily moves away from him) Twitch and I'll blow your bloody head off. You sit still. You and me, we're gonna take a little ride together. Don't try a thing. (He grabs her chin) Smile! (She bares her teeth in a phony smile) Nice. Nice. Nice.

While Lynch went into Lamb's warehouse right next to where Carew was inspecting the other Jeeps, when Lamb and Lynch drive away, they seemingly come out the other side of the building. Carew jumps into one of the other Jeeps and pursues the two of them. Even though he has only been on the island for a short time, he knows a short cut which enables him to catch up to them quickly. Carew's Jeep flips over and Lamb is about to get away, but McGarrett has been following all of them by helicopter. He lands near Lamb who is overcome with dust from the helicopter's wash. (This sequence looks extremely dangerous from a stunt point of view.) Lamb is busted – the "bookem" is "Okay, Kimo, book him. Murder one. Three counts."

Back in Honolulu, Truck is treated for his peculiar symptoms at the Queen Emma Clinics. Turns out he was not under the kahuna's curse, but instead was suffering from radiation poisoning –- which does not make sense. Carew explains (and we already knew this if we were watching carefully at the beginning of the show) that Turley thought that Numura was driving his own limousine. (Why would he do this, he was the boss of the company!) We saw Truck, who was dressed up like Numura's chauffeur. The can of radioactive material was originally placed under the front seat where Turley thought it would affect Numura (again, was he driving his own limo?), but since Truck was supposedly the chauffeur, Numura was sitting in the back seat, so Turley moved the cannister to behind the back seat. As McGarrett says, "Until Turley found out you were driving, you were sitting on a radioactive hot seat." BUT … Truck himself says "Lucky we found it before I had to chauffeur him home." Meaning Truck was never a chauffeur? DUH!! As in previous episodes like S06E12, "Anybody Can Build A Bomb," the effects of radiation are nothing serious, with Truck expected to quickly recover.

This episode has always rated low before – between a half star and a BOMB. The acting by Crosby is actually not bad, and William Smith seems more enthusiastic than in later episodes where he looks like he wants to punch Jack Lord. He actually cracks a big smile at a couple of jokes in this one and seems much more easy-going. Maybe this has something to do with him working with the attractive Crosby, who Carew can't keep his hands off? I think that this episode, which was tenth in broadcast order and eighth in production order (though this means little) was actually intended to be the third one in the twelfth season after "A Lion In The Streets" and "Who Says Cops Don't Cry?" The business with Truck being a member of HPD mentioned above would tend to reinforce this idea. The scene in this show where Carew's car rolls over is where the weird-looking shot of William Smith in the credits comes from, though the angle is slightly different. [In my latest re-view, I actually gave this show 1½ stars for some crazy reason. No, one star is enough ... this show is mostly garbage.]

There is one thing that is particularly dumb about this show, though. When Carew tells McGarrett over the phone about the kahuna's curse on Truck, McGarrett says "That sounds like something out of Captain Cook's voyages." But McGarrett himself was the victim of a kahuna's curse in the opening episode of the season, "A Lion in the Streets!" Since that show was previous to "The Kahuna" in both broadcast and production order, this comment doesn't make sense. Did someone on the writing staff forget to check this?

The show is directed by former director of photography, Robert L. Morrison. Morton Stevens' excellent score is far better than it deserves.

WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN?

Rather than "The Kahuna," the show should really be called "The Curse Of The Kahuna."

CASUALTY LIST:

    Death (x2): Inakura and Kio Mahana killed with toxic shell dust by George Lamb (not seen by us).
    Injury: Frank Turley tackled by Truck and knocked out cold.
    Injury: Truck twists his ankle walking to the beach after ignoring the kahuna.
    Death: Willie Nuna killed with toxic shell dust by Lamb.
    Injury (x2): Truck goes into spasms twice — once at the barber shop and then at Dr. Karen Lynch's house.
    Injury: Truck collapses at Lamb’s Emporium.
    Injury (x2): Kimo crashes in Jeep before tackling Lamb. Lamb punches him and knocks him out.

MORE TRIVIA:

  • This show has similarities to S10E13, "The Big Aloha," including a funeral featuring the song "Hawai‘i Aloha," and an elderly doctor whose ability to do his job is called into question.
  • The lettering on the bomb disposal truck seems to be made by the same person who made the sign on the Oahu Power Company's outside wall.
  • Last Five-O show for stock actor Terry Plunkett, who plays a barber who works in Lamb's store. The cost of a haircut according to a sign on the wall is $1.25, a shave is 75 cents. Also the last show for Emma Veary, who is the singer at the funeral at the beginning of the show.
  • A bunch of boxes near the entrance to Lamb's store contain "Coated Rolled Sugar Cones."
  • The Palm Charter Service helicopter used in this show, N2097, owned by Moores Hawaiian Helicopters, crashed with one fatality on January 1, 1984.
  • When he is communicating with Carew at the beginning of the show, McGarrett has a lot of radio equipment on his desk.
  • Don Knight's son Mark posted on Mark & Julie's Five-O site on July 20, 2003: "The Kahuna stinks. Dad was on pain meds after running through a 1/4 glass door thinking my sister had just been run over by a car." (Reposted on Magnum-Mania.com board)

GALLERY:

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270. (S12E11) Labyrinth ★★½  KIMO, BOOK HER 

Original air date: 12/25/79 — Opening CreditsEnd Credits
Director: Barry Crane; Producer: Andrew Gottlieb (Hollywood); Writers: Michael Janover (teleplay), Paul Playdon (story); Music: Robert Drasnin
Timings: Teaser: 0:32; Main Titles: 0:58; Act One: 16:48; Act Two: 9:32; Act Three: 11:57; Act Four: 9:25; End Credits: 0:39; Total Time: 49:51.

QUICK PLOT:

Five-O tries to solve the kidnapping of a wealthy socialite despite the objections of her husband, who insists that if the police are involved his wife will be killed.

Click here to read Full Plot.

REVIEW:

There are so many wacky plot twists and double crosses in this episode that leaving the room while watching is not advisable.

Christine Ames (Tricia O'Neil), wife of Dr. Kenneth (James Olson), "the dean of plastic surgeons" on Oahu, is chloroformed and kidnapped by her English-accented chauffeur Larry Wilkens (Ted Hamilton) on her way home from the beauty parlor. When Ames' lawyer Dave DiMarco (Lyle Bettger) finds out, he calls Five-O. Ames is annoyed about this, because he "wanted to avoid police intervention," something the kidnapper specifically demanded. DiMarco tells him, "Christine's life is in jeopardy. I think we need all the help we can get."

There is another reason for Ames' annoyance, however. Christine was in a serious car accident a couple of years before where she suffered serious facial injuries. Ames reconstructed her face so she would look like his girlfriend Lisa (also played in the show by O'Neil). Not only is Wilkens involved with the kidnapping but Lisa and Ames himself. The idea is that Wilkins will get paid off and Ames will run away with his girlfriend; Christine will be murdered.

After incapacitating her, Wilkens takes Christine to some shack on an isolated beach and ties her up. This dilapidated building looks like the set decorator told the carpenters "make a shack in imminent danger of collapsing if someone breathes on it."

The limousine and Wilkens are later found in the "James Hong" area of the Diamond Head Tunnel (see S02E01), with the limo down the side of a hill. Wilkens tries to explain what happened to Five-O and the cops very lamely, that he was forced off the road by two men in another car wearing ski masks. He tells them, "Horrible business, that kidnapping the missus like that. And I hope you catch those thugs that done it."

Considering this was the third twelfth season show produced, both Lori and Carew are relatively eager beavers as far as the investigation is concerned.

Lori goes to see the swishy hairdresser Georgio Ramsey (Anthony Innéo) at the beauty parlor who was the last person who saw Christine before she was grabbed. He tells Lori that Christine was "an absolute dog to work on," perhaps an in-joke referring to O'Neil's role in season eleven's canine-centric "The Bark and the Bite," and "not a happy woman." When his manicurist (Andrea Pike) makes a remark about Christine's nail polish, Georgio minces, "Gloria ... get ... lost!"

Based on what Lori learns from "Gorgeous Georgio" and passes along to Carew, Kimo goes to see Nick Rossiter (Don Lamond), a private detective who is a retired sergeant from HPD. During their troubled marriage, Christine hired Rossiter to investigate whether her husband was having an affair with some other woman. Rossiter found that Ames was having an affair — with Lisa, the woman for whom Christine had become a doppelgänger.

Talking like a detective in some film noir, Rossiter tells Carew, "This broad [Christine] had money to burn. This wasn't gonna be one of those hundred-dollar, 'I'll take his picture, she takes him to court' jobs … Frankly, pal, she was a nutcase … One, her old man is fooling around with another broad. Two, she's got no proof, so, three, she hires me to find out who the other woman is. So I did, I found out. Well, all right, who was it? It was her … They found a new way for rich people to make you look like an idiot … Nick Rossiter may not be the smartest guy and he may not hang around with the best bunch of people, but he ain't nobody's fool. The next time I saw that broad, I told her what she could do with her money and her old man. And I ain't seen her since because she's a fruitcake."

Meanwhile, Lisa comes to the shack on the beach to send a ransom message to Ames using a battery-powered portable phone and a recorder with a distorted man's voice on a cassette tape. I don't know why she comes specifically there, she could have done this from anywhere. Ames subsequently has trouble raising the million dollars demanded from his own funds, but manages to combine it with some of his wife's separately held money because DiMarco has power of attorney for her. Ames takes his yacht to some pre-arranged middle-of-nowhere location out in the ocean. Lisa swims out to meet him and get the ransom. She then returns to shore and murders Christine, which we do not see.

Pretending to be Christine, Lisa wanders to a nearby beach and collapses near a group of surfers. She is returned home pretending to be Ames' wife, complete with marks on her arms suggesting she was doped up. You have to wonder why the shack was chosen if people were not that far away from it — someone might have stumbled on it with Christine tied up inside ... or dead.

Ames is overjoyed to see her (meaning Lisa), but not so much after Wilkens drugs a celebratory drink which knocks him out. When Ames is slapped awake later by McGarrett, he acts shocked, as if his wife has run off with his chauffeur.

Lisa and Wilkens have stolen Ames' yacht, heading for Brazil (!). But Lisa placed an explosive device on the hull of the boat after she got the cash from Ames earlier, and sets a timer to blow the boat up, presumably going over the side and back to shore, though we also do not see this. The special effects for this explosion are a bit better than usual.

Five-O and the cops surveil the yacht and see the explosion "on the radar screen" when it happens. Upon being told about this, Ames continues his act, shocked that "Christine and Wilkens" are now both dead.

However, McGarrett knows everything about Ames' scheme, thanks to a tape which Lisa left beside Ames before she split with Wilkens: "I'm sorry, Kenny. You knew it all along, didn't you, that I loved Larry? So this was the only way. I couldn't do it. I couldn't go on playing your wife and I couldn't kill Christine. I knew you wanted me to, but murder just isn't my thing. Anyway, she's alive, just as we left her. Why don't you look at it this way, Kenny? At least they won't be trying you for murder. So I'll write you from Rio, and, uh, thanks a million."

Holding out hope that Christine is still alive as per what he has just heard, Ames tells McGarrett where Christine was going to be held at the shack, and soon enough Five-O and a bunch of HPD cops show up there. Ames is absent from the show's finale, presumably having been busted.

McGarrett rattles off the usual "everything that has happened" speech to "Christine," who is actually Lisa. He throws the name "Rossiter" at her, trying to trip her up, but Lisa knows who Rossiter is, saying that he "was a detective that I hired for something personal." Huh? Maybe it really was Lisa (pretending to be Christine) who hired him. After all, Rossiter was very confused by the two women. McGarrett tells her, "Not really, he's a detective that Christine hired and you're not Christine, you're Lisa." Huh, again? At this point I was starting to tear my hair out.

The big clincher which proves that Lisa is pretending to be Christine is "Andre's Red Door Red" nail polish which Christine had applied to her nails when she was at the beauty parlor before she was kidnapped. Lisa as Christine does not have her nails painted. McGarrett tells Kimo to "Book her, murder one," but I think he may have a tough case if there is no body!

The main attraction of this episode is the very sexy O'Neil, an actress I would like to see reading the phone book.

On the other hand, some of the dialogue in the show is bizarre, for example, what must be one of the stupidest lines in all of Five-O. At the beginning when Ames doesn't want to admit to McGarrett and Carew that his wife Christine has been kidnapped and suggests that she is on the mainland, Carew blurts out, "Yeah, and I'm the Queen of the May." The very testy Ames considers this response to be "insolent."

Later, when he returns from paying the ransom money, Ames asks Kimo, "Are we having a luau? You should have told me, Mr. Carew, I'd have roasted a pig," presumably a snide reference to the disparaging slang term for a cop.

The music by Robert Drasnin is pretty crappy. It has a momentary lapse into Post/Carpenter cheapness at the end when the Five-O crew and cops run to the shack on the beach. The scene before the first commercial "wave" is one of the least suspenseful act endings in the whole series.

The big question at the end of the show is how did Lisa, pretending to be Christine, tie herself up in the shack on the beach used to confine Ames' wife, and what did Lisa do with Christine's body after she killed her earlier?

CASUALTY LIST:

    Injury: Christine Ames chloroformed and kidnapped by Larry Wilkens.
    Injury: Wilkens hurt when limousine crashes off the road.
    Injury: Dr. Kenneth Ames drugged by Wilkens on orders from Lisa.
    Death: Wilkens killed when cabin cruiser explodes with bomb set by Lisa.
    Death: Christine Ames killed by Lisa.

MORE TRIVIA:

  • Georgio's hair salon is located in Eaton Square, which is at 438 Hobron Lane, Honolulu. In the show, the street number on a post at the entrance is 444. This location is very close to the Ilikai Hotel.
  • Ames is supposed to drop the money at latitude 151° N, longitude 39° W but these co-ordinates are far too simple, not to mention wrong. A typical Hawaiian location like Honolulu would be more like latitude 21.3069° N and longitude -157.8583° W.
  • Poor Duke! After he and Kimo grill Wilkens the chauffeur, who is discovered with head injuries after Christine's disappearance, Kimo tells Duke to put out an APB on the kidnappers, and then in a bossy way reminiscent of McGarrett, to put a 24-hour tail on Wilkens.
  • Chauffeur Wilkins, supposedly from the UK, speaks with an unsteady "British" accent. His nationality gets Scotland Yard involved, according to Carew, but to what extent, we do not find out. Actor Hamilton is actually Australian. His use of the word "mate" is a clue here, though English from both of these countries shares this expression. Hamilton later appeared in the Jack Lord-directed TV pilot "M Station Hawaii." The part of the chauffeur would have been better played by Don Knight if he didn't already appear in this season's "The Kahuna" and was able to restrain himself. Wilkins is seen smoking a couple of times.
  • A Craig portable tape recorder, similar to those used in Mission: Impossible (the control switch is in a V-type hollow), is used — interestingly, director Barry Crane did several episodes of that series. A Superscope cassette deck is being used by the cops to record calls from the kidnappers at Ames' place, likely a model C-104 or C-105.
  • Christine's old Texas driver's license (number D37143) says that her address was 1240 Rodeo Rd., Dallas 75149. It expires on her birthdate in 1980, there are no restrictions, her date of birth is 12/22/42, her height is 5′6″ and her eyes are brown.
  • Rossiter has the phone number 808-555-6340 on his business card. Carew meets him in his "office" which is actually a pool hall at 1246 Opaka ("Hopaco" in the subtitles) where a guy named Honolulu Fats (Robert Allan Cabral) is showing off. Carew is seen drinking a beer as he talks to Rossiter.
  • McGarrett wears a leisure suit. He has a couple of major brainstorms in this show including "There's more than a simple kidnapping going on here." The "bookem" at the end is "OK, Kimo, book her, murder one."

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271. (S12E12) School for Assassins BOMB – NO STARS!

Original air date: 1/1/80 — Opening CreditsEnd Credits
Director: Don Weis; Producers: Andrew Gottlieb (Hollywood), William F. Phillips (Hawaii); Writers: Frank Telford (teleplay), Carey Wilber and Frank Telford (story); Music: Robert Drasnin
Timings: Teaser: 0:32; Main Titles: 0:58; Act One: 13:46; Act Two: 14:55; Act Three: 7:48; Act Four: 11:48; End Credits: 0:39; Total Time: 49:56.

QUICK PLOT:

Five-O provides security for a meeting between an oil billionaire and a representative from OPEC which is threatened by highly-trained killers.

Click here to read Full Plot.

REVIEW:

In this show, which is straight out of The A-Team, Lloyd Bochner as the pouty-mouthed and English-accented Colonel Avery, who was involved in the assassination of a Malaysian diplomat in Hong Kong, runs a terrorist school in suburban Honolulu. (I don't suppose it is listed in the Yellow Pages.)

"Special guest star" Gary (2001: A Space Odyssey) Lockwood, who was over 40 when he filmed this episode and looks old and out of shape, plays Kelsey, one of Avery's pupils who has to enter the school surreptitiously and make his way to Avery's office in record time in order to graduate to the next level of his training. I don't understand why he has to do this in a secret manner. Isn't Kelsey "studying" at the school, like several other people we meet later? Do they have another classroom somewhere else for people who haven't passed the course yet?

The beginning of the show is kind of strange, not to mention stupid. Kelsey assumes the identity of one of the employees of the school, Jonathan Dempsey (uncredited actor), after taking Dempsey's clothes and handcuffing him to a car, leaving Dempsey dressed only in his underpants. Kelsey forces Dempsey to say his name which is taped on a portable recorder. Kelsey uses this to bypass the security entrance to the school, where employees are admitted via voice recognition. We don't see where this tape recorder is hidden on Kelsey; in fact, he uses a remote control to activate it and lip-synchs Dempsey's name which was previously recorded. When he is dealing with Dempsey, Kelsey is wearing a weird bondage-type leather vest which has all these special pockets and clips which are presumably for the assassin trade. Very kinky!

The whole business of Kelsey disguising his voice in this manner (the playback of which, unlike a typical ca-ssette recording, is near-digital in quality) is ridiculous. How many people work for Avery's school anyway? (Kelsey enters with several others starting their shift; it looks like about 8 people.) You would suspect that the security guards who monitor Kelsey's entrance would know what Dempsey looks like. Wouldn't they see Dempsey come to work?

Maybe the "test" is Kelsey has to get to Avery in his house which is located inside the grounds. To do this, Kelsey first cuts through a glass window in a perfectly rectangular way. Once he gets into the building, Kelsey turns around and almost shows us the crack in his ass, since he doesn't seem to be wearing any underpants (obviously since he never took Dempsey's). Then he bypasses an electric eye by pointing a flashlight into one of the detectors. He pulls out this huge Polaroid-like camera from somewhere. It is not inside his tool vest, but seems to be behind him, which is weird, because when we saw him walking earlier, there were no bulges in this area. Maybe he is hiding it in his ass! Kelsey takes a picture using this instant camera and then puts it in front of a security camera using a clamp which fails to take into account the focal length of its lens.

Finally, after picking a lock, Kelsey gets into Avery's office where his mission is to pretend to shoot the boss. Having passed this test in "not bad" time of 22 minutes and 14 seconds, Kelsey is primed for a big operation involving the assassination of the mideast oil sheikh Ahmed Bishara (Murli H. Manghnani), who is meeting soon with oil billionaire John J. Ellington III (Monte Markham) at the latter's palatial home on the Nu'uanu Pali.

The security provided by Five-O and HPD for Ellington at this location is mediocre. When Ellington escapes from being cooped up by the cops by driving away in the Honda of his old college classmate Ted Morley (Christopher Law) who has dropped in for a visit, why don't the cops recognize Ellington? Why do the cops let Morley in to visit in the first place?

Kelsey and other "students" of Avery, thinking Ellington is Morley, proceed to tail him, because they "may find out how much time we have before Ellington's visitor [the sheikh] arrives." Free from his responsibilities, Ellington heads to Waikiki where he runs into Jennifer Fair (Pamela Susan Shoop), probably not by coincidence. She met him earlier in the show when he was on his way to Hawaii and, feeling faint, she stumbled into the executive boarding lounge at the San Francisco airport where he took a liking to her. While Ellington and Jennifer are having lunch, the baddies attempt to kidnap him which is foiled by Jennifer as well as Truck and Kimo who arrive on the scene. The kidnappers flee in their van.

Soon after this is a scene which makes no sense whatsoever. Avery and Kelsey, dressed like HPD cops, along with other members of the assassination team, are seen going down through a trap door in what looks like a laundry room. Huh? Whose house is this trap door in? Why would Avery and the others have to go somewhere (who knows where?) in this manner?

One of the team is the blond bombshell assassin Idra Dassan (Lynne Ellen Hollinger), who, posing as an OPEC security agent and driving a yellow Mercedes convertible, soon gets past the cops at the gate to Ellington's place without any questions. McGarrett is suspicious of her, though, and as she sits waiting for her credentials to be checked and Avery and his team to show up and kill the sheikh, she is sending some kind of Morse code-like signals to them via her wristwatch. Recognized by Jennifer from the kidnap scene earlier, Idra wounds Truck (taking her gun from a garter-belt holster reminiscent of a western movie). He says "She just nicked me," adding, in an attempt to be funny, "She ruined my best shirt!"

The ending is terrible. The attempt to kill the sheikh comes to nothing, and both Kelsey and Avery are knocked off by McGarrett, the latter after throwing a grenade at McGarrett which he throws back. (It detonates in about 9 seconds.) As Karen Rhodes points out in her book on Five-O, what is the point of building up the character of Kelsey throughout the entire show to have him meet such an ignominous end at its finale?

After all the ruckus dies down and Jennifer leaves (though not without some hints of future romance), Ellington, in a dopey manner, offers McGarrett a job running his oil company, saying "You could have been a rich man," which McGarrett refuses. McGarrett says, "I am rich, in many ways." The final freeze frame has him smiling contentedly, looking like a giant glazed donut.

About the only thing maintaining my interest in this show was actress Shoop, especially when she is wearing a bikini while surfing (see below). Markham's gentle portrayal of the oil kingpin as someone totally oblivious as to why anyone would want to do him harm, also engenders some sympathy.

But overall, this episode is a real stinker.

CASUALTY LIST:

    Injury: Kimo punches out security guard in Avery’s "library."
    Injury: John J. Ellington III is grabbed by Kelsey and Ross and almost chloroformed; he seems dazed after this.
    Injury: Jennifer Fair is thrown against cargo truck by Kelsey.
    Injury (x2): Two HPD officers are put out of action by Avery and Kelsey.
    Injury: Truck is nicked in the shoulder by shot from Idra Dassan.
    Death: Kelsey is shot by McGarrett, presumably dead.
    Death: Avery presumably dies from explosion of grenade McGarrett throws back at him.

MORE TRIVIA:

  • Here is a comparison between a TV broadcast of this show and the remastered DVDs.
  • Avery has a "priceless jade collection" which is the excuse for all the security at his property. McGarrett correctly recognizes one of the pieces as being from the Qianlong Dynasty.
  • The security for Avery's house is actually pretty mediocre, since Kimo can infiltrate it with little difficulty in the guise of a telephone repairman who was pretending to work nearby. When he is escaping after fighting with one of the security guards, Kimo jumps down from some location that a guard dog was seen running beside only seconds before. There is a spectacular stunt where Kimo leaps off a cliff into a pool far below. Later when he gets back to Ellington's, Kimo tells him "You are all wet," though at that point he doesn't seem to be.
  • At the end, Avery and Kelsey, dressed as cops, have to go up a high wall to get into Ellington's place. Avery climbs on top of Kelsey's shoulders (knocking off Kelsey's cap), and once he is on the top, Avery turns around and reaches over (not very far) to help pull Kelsey up ... but how could Kelsey get up that high on the wall if Avery had to be on his shoulders in the first place?
  • Silent-screen actress "Miss" Dorothy Mackaill, who appeared in S09E11, "Target — A Cop," is in this episode as an old lady who likes to snoop on her neighbors (including people at Avery's place conveniently nearby) with her telescope.
  • Why does Avery join the mission at the end? Just so his character can be eliminated in the final confrontation with McGarrett? Bochner, who was around age 55 when the show was filmed, seems too old to be scaling walls and performing similar stunts.
  • There is a reference to the food at the Halekulani Terrace being very good. This may refer to the Hau Terrace in the Halekulani Hotel.
  • McGarrett first says the sheikh's name is "Bisra," later mispronouncing it as "Bisara" and "Bitara"!
  • Ellington travels from San Francisco to Hawaii on Trans Coastal Airlines.
  • The quality of video signals broadcast on security cameras in Avery's place is terrible.
  • Gary Lockwood's appearance in this show is conspicuously absent from the filmography in his Wikipedia article. Lockwood, whose real name is John Gary Yurosek, seems to have retired from acting, though he did appear as himself in the 2020 film Unbelievable!!!!!, where the lead actor is Snoop Dog.

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272. (S12E13) For Old Times Sake ★★  BOOK THEM ALL 

Original air date: 1/8/80 — Opening CreditsEnd Credits
Director: Dennis Donnelly; Producers: Andrew Gottlieb (Hollywood), William F. Phillips (Hawaii); Writers: Ben Masselink (teleplay), Susan Wakeford (story); Music: John Cacavas
Timings: Teaser: 0:32; Main Titles: 0:58; Act One: 11:39; Act Two: 13:27; Act Three: 11:45; Act Four: 10:53; End Credits: 0:40; Total Time: 49:54.

QUICK PLOT:

An aging counterfeiter resumes his activities to help out a home for girls which is threatened with closure, but he fails to foresee the problems that result.

Click here to read Full Plot.

REVIEW:

Four residents of the Hale Maluhia ("House of Safety") school for wayward girls accompany Willie McFee (English character actor Peter Bromilow), the place's resident handyman to the Ala Moana Mall where he has some errand to run. One of the girls, Panali (Petra Fujii), distracts a salesman (Bill Bigelow) at the Excellent Gems Corp. jewelry store, while a second, Janie (Patricia Hume), unsuccessfully attempts to steal a $12,000 diamond necklace in the window. A third girl, Wendy (Kelly Palzis) acts as a lookout. Alerted to the theft, the saleman freaks out and pursues the girls, who escape through the outdoor areas of the mall. It seems as if he leaves the store unattended! The girls reach the car where McFee is waiting and they leave the area quickly.

The girls soon fess up as to what they were doing, and McFee is appalled, even though their rationale is to raise funds for the school which owes $15,000 in back taxes and may be closed down soon. McFee tells them, "Hale Maluhia is a second chance for you girls. You're already one-time losers." It isn't mentioned anywhere in the show what their "crimes" were, no doubt it was penny-ante stuff like they just tried to pull off. It's not as if they were teenage hookers, they all look too wholesome!

McFee scoffs at them when they think the necklace will get them $12,000. He doubts they would get even $1,000 from a fence. When Janie asks, "How do you know all this, Willie?", Palani responds, "Willie knows everything. He went to school in England." McPhee tells them, "Even Willie doesn't know everything. But one thing he does know, in this life there is no easy way to make a buck."

Word of this attempted robbery soon gets to McGarrett, because he is pals with Dolly Simmons (Neva Patterson), the boss of the school. Carew tells him that "the young lady driving the getaway car came from the halfway house," which is odd, because it was McFee who was driving. McGarrett visits the school and gives the girls a stern lecture, again referring to them as "one-time losers on probation" without going into details.

When the chastened girls leave, Dolly compliments McGarrett on his performance: "You missed your calling. Should have been an actor." McGarrett smiles, but says he will have to do "a lot of reasoning" with the jewelry store owner to get him to drop the charges. Dolly confirms to him that the school is in financial trouble because the government is cutting back on funding and "private contributions have all but disappeared."

After McGarrett leaves, Dolly talks to Willie, whom she described to McGarrett as "gardener, handyman, horticultural genius," and tells him about the trouble the school is in as well. She wonders what he will do if the place closes down, and is curious about what he "used to do." McFee says, "odd jobs ... all kinds of odd jobs."

McPhee's background is a bit more complicated than that, because he really is Monty Pearson, a legendary counterfeiter. Pearson has kept a couple of plates for $20 bills with him which are buried in a box of dirt in the school's greenhouse along with a bundle of bills which he produced. He suddenly realizes how to help the school get out of their financial dilemma.

Pearson goes to visit Eddie Riford (George Herman), a printer who he knew when he was in jail 18 years before who has a "straight" business in Honolulu. Pearson tells Eddie he wants to get back in action "for old times' sake ... not for me, for someone who needs the money rather badly." He needs Eddie to help him find "a small press ... that isn't on a main street," and Eddie is only too glad to help him out.

Meanwhile, Carew has been to The Hula Shop to buy some supplies for a luau, and, in a convenient coincidence for the script, he was given change from money which Pearson spent at the same store, "the last from the batch 20 years ago." Carew plays McGarrett a game of "bullshit poker" (known in the show as "Hawaiian poker") for the small change, where they compare serial numbers on two $20 bills he got ... except these two bills have the same serial numbers. When they take these bills to John Holland of the Secret Service (Paul Udell), he says that their engraving is a real "work of art," and it was probably done by Pearson.

Monty contacts three of his old associates to come and join his enterprise: Sam Chong (Yankee Chang), currently in Singapore, Pierre Soule (Michael F. Martin), a roulette dealer in Monaco and Joe Morgan (Dick Fair), a doorman in Miami Beach. They are all enthusiastic about getting together again, though Morgan is quick to contact Tony Balsani (Michael Morgan), a gangster who Pearson jerked around years ago when he reneged on a deal to produce counterfeit plates for him. Since Pearson went off the radar a long time ago, and Balsani now knows he is in Hawaii, Balsani tells Morgan that he will "pay the freight" to send him there and Joe will have "a piece." But Balsani also sends two hitmen — Sol Bruno (Ric Marlow) and Rico (Bob Hoy) to track Pearson down and exact revenge.

The two thugs show up at Eddie's shop and seriously trash the place, steal two plates which Eddie himself created and shoot Eddie dead. When they realize the plates are not Pearson's, they double their efforts to locate him. It seems like Morgan has tipped off Balsani about the home for girls, so they go there, where they threaten Pearson and Dolly. Pearson has taken the plates out of the box in the dirt (the shot where he puts the box back in the dirt is exactly the same one we saw before), but the plates are in a flower pot. Dolly picks up this flower pot, not knowing what contains, and throws it. Is she trying to throw it at Ric Marlow? It falls on some concrete and breaks and Marlow finds the plates in the debris, as if he knew they were there, which is dumb. Bruno and Rico march Pearson and Dolly out of the place, to run off a couple of thousand twenties for each of them. Presumably they make Pearson tell them where the printing plant is.

The next scene finds us at the location Eddie told Pearson about, "a small workroom in the middle of a shantytown on Pebble Island near Pearl Harbor," which looks like a place where you might find homeless people, rather than a printing press and various equipment. The two thugs are impatient at the speed at which the money is being created. McGarrett and Carew come to the greenhouse at Hale Maluhia. McGarrett talks to himself out loud as if we cannot see what he is doing. In the box in the dirt he finds Eddie's business card which has the address on Pebble Island written on the back.

McGarrett and Carew hasten to the shack where Rico and Bruno are going to execute Pearson and his friends, including Dolly, since it is taking to long to print the money. Joe expects preferential treatment because he was the one who tipped off Balsani, but he is shot dead by Rico, who says "Rats go too." What follows is ridiculous.

McGarrett and Carew are now outside. Saying "we need a diversion of some sort," McGarrett ties a rope around a support for the shack which is right beside the beach and attaches it to a nearby motorboat. In the time they take to set this up, the two gangsters could have knocked off everyone inside! Carew guns the motorboat, half of the shack collapses into the ocean and McGarrett rushes up and saves the day. Kimo seems to get back to land very quickly.

The ending is sucky, with Pearson getting busted and ending up in Halawa where he can work on his hobby of cultivating hibiscus flowers. McGarrett visits him to relay news that the school will be saved, because "The governor has declared that Hale Maluhia is going to be an historical landmark, making it tax-exempt." The music by Cacavas (his only twelfth season score) is awful; the score at the beginning sounds like a Carpenters song.

Overall, this show, which is kind of "cute," is not that great, but it is still ahead of some of the other episodes this season. I don't really understand why Pearson gets his pals to come to Hawaii, other than having sort of a "homecoming" reunion, since he seems perfectly capable of printing the money by himself at the end of the show.

WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN?

As Pearson explains to Eddie — he wants to get back to counterfeiting "for old times' sake."

CASUALTY LIST:

    Death: Eddie Riford shot twice by Sol Bruno.
    Injury (x2): Willie/Monty Pearson and Dolly manhandled by Bruno and Rico.
    Death: Morgan shot by Rico.
    Injury: Rico shot in the leg by McGarrett.

MORE TRIVIA:

  • Even in an episode as mundane as this, it is nice to see the driving sequence when Monte and the girls are escaping from the robbery which does not use a process shot. There are also numerous "historical" views of downtown Honolulu during the show.
  • The title of the show is "For Old Times Sake," but looking this up on the Internet suggests it should be spelled "For Old Times' Sake." Times with an apostrophe after the "s" is what is used in the one instance of this in the subtitles.
  • Wendy is played by Kelly Palzis, later Kelly Preston and Mrs. John Travolta, who passed away in 2020.
  • McGarrett wears a black leisure suit towards the end of the show.
  • When McGarrett gets a call on his phone from Holland, he asks the receptionist to put the caller on speaker, but isn't that something under his control?
  • Joe Morgan in Miami Beach is walking a couple of dogs outside the hotel when Monty phones him. The guy from the hotel who comes outside and tells Morgan there is a phone call is John Fitzgibbon (uncredited), who starred in You Don't See Many Pirates These Days, Frozen Assets and The Case Against Philip Christie. The entry for Fitzgibbon at IMDb, which supposedly has the H50 actor playing parts as recently as 2009 is totally wrong, as far as I am concerned. (Thanks to Rama.)
  • Hanging on the wall in Eddie's shop is a T-shirt for Uku Books. There is also a calendar for the Fort Ruger Market showing the month of September 1979.
  • On one of the bills seen which Pearson produced 20 years before, the signature of the Treasury Secretary is that of W. Michael Blumenthal, who was appointed in 1977, just a few years before this episode took place (from IMDb).
  • Eddie's business card reads "A Total Printing Service While U Wait." OKAY PRINT SHOP, 431 Kuliouou Road, Honolulu, Hi 96821.
  • The "bookem" is "Book them all."
  • At the end of the show, when Pearson says "Mahalo" to McGarrett, he emphasizes the word's first syllable.

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273. (S12E14) The Golden Noose BOMB – NO STARS!  KIMO, BOOK HIM 

Original air date: 1/15/80 — Opening CreditsEnd Credits
Director: Beau Van den Ecker; Producers: Andrew Gottlieb (Hollywood), William F. Phillips (Hawaii); Writer: George F. Slavin; Music: Les Hooper
Timings: Teaser: 0:31; Main Titles: 0:58; Act One: 12:20; Act Two: 10:54; Act Three: 8:24; Act Four: 16>02; End Credits: 0:39; Total Time: 49:48.

QUICK PLOT:

McGarrett is suspicious of the aide-de-camp to a southeast Asian premier who arrives in Honolulu to retrieve $150 million in gold being held for the country's treasury.

Click here to read Full Plot.

REVIEW:

This episode is a real typical twelfth season episode — in other words, bad. The lead female character, Nadira, is played by the attractive Irene Yah-Ling Sun who also appeared in S11E03, an equally cartoonish show.

It begins with geologist James Weaver (Joe Moore) returning to his home in the middle of the jungle in the bogus Southeast Asian country of Baradak. His girlfriend Nadira (Yah-Ling Sun) awaits him and they engage in some smooching which is a bit more intense than we usually see on the show. He has just made a discovery of uranium deposits which will make the country rich. Nadira seems to be a nurse, and she departs for a hospital in the city where she has to "check out," after which she will meet Weaver at a hotel where it sounds like they will "do it like monkeys."

Shortly after, Weaver is picked up by Jonas Halloran (Ed Lauter, with an Irish-sounding accent) along with the country's finance minister P. Sandifer (Ed Fernandez). They are all going to the country's capital to have a meeting with the premier, Lon Tho (Colin de Silva). After making sure that no one knows about the uranium (only Nadira does, which Weaver doesn't mention), Halloran orders the driver of the car, the thuggish East Indian Le Doc (Kimo Hugho) to stop. Weaver is ordered out and shot dead!

Halloran intends to go to Hawaii, where $150 million of Baradak's gold bullion has been kept in a bank for safekeeping, liberate this money from the bank, and then use it to fund an insurrection which will overthrow the current government of Lon Tho. After this, Halloran says the country's newly-discovered riches (i.e., the uranium) will be "all ours," meaning it will belong to him and Sandifer, and Lon Tho will be deposed. The country has been plagued with trouble, and Halloran first has to take care of mercenaries who are causing instability.

We cut to some time after this, where the Hawaiian Governor, McGarrett and some US government "secretary" named B.A. Barney (John Stalker) are watching a news report from Baradak, which shows Lon Tho and his "right-hand man, technically aide-de-camp" Halloran leading armed forces to victory. Now that the crisis is over, the government of Baradak wants their money in the First Security Bank of Oahu back. McGarrett will be in charge of providing security when they come to pick it up soon.

McGarrett is bothered by the involvement of Halloran with the Baradak government, saying he is a "mercenary, adventurer, mixed up in the Obutu uprising in Africa, [and who] soldiered in Angola, Zaire, Zimbabwe." You have to wonder, though, why McGarrett would focus so much attention on him; does he sit around reading Soldier of Fortune magazine in his spare time?

When Halloran and Lon Tho show up in Honolulu on Air Niugini (the national airline of New Guinea), Nadira is there on the airport tarmac with a crowd of people, and she advances towards Halloran. Intercepted by Carew, she is discovered to have a knife in her purse. She is taken to Five-O headquarters where her story about Weaver unexpectedly disappearing is passed along by Kimo, who interviewed her. She says that she has come to Hawaii because she had no luck trying to contact Halloran back home.

There was already tension between Halloran and McGarrett at the airport, as if each of them knew the other might be trouble, and there is more later at a party at the Governor's residence where McGarrett asks about Weaver, and then stupidly starts dragging the name of Nadira — "that woman at the airport" — into the conversation as the person who has prompted his curiosity: "She saw him [Weaver] the day he returned from his field trip. He definitely confirmed the deposits. [Halloran has denied these were positive.] … She said she met Weaver at his bungalow the day he returned. He told her that the survey was a great success and he was to meet you and go with you to see the premier."

Halloran denies that he ever met Weaver, who he says phoned to say that his survey was a "washout" and that he was leaving the country. He wonders why McGarrett is "taking the word of a native girl, probably a jilted native girl, over mine." Objecting to being questioned by McGarrett, Halloran asks, "What's your game, McGarrett?" McGarrett replies, "My game is lawbreakers."

Nadira is released from Five-O and spends most of her time being an annoying character who seems to know a lot more than she should. Her mere presence in Hawaii is odd, since it would probably have cost her an arm and a leg to get there. She gets into Halloran's Ilikai hotel room where it doesn't take him long to notice her, but only after she overhears him talking to some guy named "Dutchman" about "AK-13s and lightweight rocket launchers." After Nadira is discovered, she brings up the subject of her boyfriend. Halloran tells her, "I don't like to say it, but it looks like your boyfriend's taken a powder. You'd better put him out of your mind and go home. In the long run you'll be better off." He pats her on the shoulder and sends her off, but as soon as she is out of the room, he tells Le Doc, "She's dangerous. Get rid of her. Accidentally."

Le Doc follows her and at a street corner with a truck approaching, tries to push her in front of it. But instead of falling in front of the truck, she falls to her left, and Le Doc supposedly falls under the truck himself, though we do not see this. Nadira throws up her hands and runs away as Le Doc rolls around in the street, his turban having fallen off. Some old man runs after Nadira, as if she was the one who pushed Le Doc into the street! This whole sequence is handled in a totally inept manner. (I am sure that in a previous viewing of this scene years ago, I saw a totally different version of what happened when Le Doc was run over.)

At the morgue when Halloran identifies Le Doc's body, McGarrett says he was pushed by a woman, and continues: "The witness said she was foreign-looking, mid-20s, Asian probably. I thought perhaps she could have been a native of Baradak, huh?" (He is making a big assumption here just to jerk Halloran's chain, I guess.) When he shows Halloran a gun that Le Doc was carrying, Halloran says it was in his capacity as "a body guard … for the premier and the entire official party." McGarrett says that he has seen "only one like it before, taken from an international terrorist." Halloran is pissed at McGarrett's attitude.

McGarrett goes to see some guy named Tom Parsons (Bob Turnbull) to find about Le Doc's weapon. Parsons tells him, "This is an RR4, caliber .380. It's the smallest automatic weapon made. The major, legitimate market is for foreign governments, police forces. Firing rate is 1200 rounds per minute. [This seems incredible, considering how small the gun is.] … They're rapidly becoming a favorite of insurrectionists, mercenaries, terrorists. Somehow, they're falling into the wrong hands … through dealers in illegal weapons." He identifies two such local dealers: "Harry Polifax, alias the Undertaker. He's been inactive since parole. He owns a coffin manufacturing business now. And the other one? Jan Schyler, alias The Dutchman. Runs a scrap metal reclamation yard near Pier 13."

Nadira calls McGarrett from a pay phone and tells him that she has heard the police are looking for her in connection with Le Doc's death, but how would she have heard this? She says, "I didn't kill that man, Mr. McGarrett. He was trying to kill me." McGarrett replies, "Why would Halloran wanna kill you?" But she never said Halloran was trying to kill her! Nevertheless, she goes into detail about how she overheard Halloran talking on the phone to The Dutchman. McGarrett urges her to come in to the office for protection, but she says "No, Mr. McGarrett. I have to follow through," and hangs up.

The resourceful Nadira manages to locate the scrap yard of The Dutchman (John A. Hunt) and goes there where she gets in through a door while employees are going home from work and locking the main gate right beside her. Confronting her with a gun, calling her "Liebchen" (actually a German word meaning "Sweetheart"), Dutchman tells her, "A very curious lady. Now, I wonder, about what? What was it Mr. Halloran told me about a young, attractive Baradak lady? [Did we hear Halloran tell him that? NO!] That you are here to spy. So you're going to take a little walk."

McGarrett and Kimo are nearby, prompted by Nadira's phone call, and hearing a shot fired from inside the scrap yard, they knock the heavy corrugated aluminum gate down with their car — which is not the Mercury Grand Brougham, but a Ford LTD. The car doesn't seem to suffer much damage because the way the gate flies apart is weird – it breaks into multiple pieces which were maybe attached to strings which pulled them away from the car.

Dutchman is cornered after McGarrett and Kimo follow him around the scrapyard in a circle. They try to make him confess to his complicity with Halloran, but all he says is "I haven't done anything. I just agreed to sell some equipment." Suddenly, he is assassinated by Halloran who appears out of nowhere, having climbed to the top of a huge pile of wrecked cars nearby to take deadly aim with a large rifle. Halloran immediately disappears.

McGarrett returns to the Governor's office where he finds Halloran, who has been giving the Governor a piece of his mind regarding McGarrett's interference with everything he has been doing while in Hawaii "establishing friendly relationships." While I don't think McGarrett actually saw Halloran at the junkyard, the top cop launches into a rant accusing Halloran of killing The Dutchman as well as covering up Weaver's report about the uranium because he is "planning to take over that little country … [with] money, to pay for arms, equipment and mercenaries. And you propose to get that money tomorrow morning." Of course, typical of such McGarrett rants, this is all true!

Halloran is fed up, saying McGarrett is "throwing his weight around," "paranoid," and basing his suspicions on what Nadira told him. Halloran tells the Governor (who says almost nothing during this entire scene): "I hereby withdraw from any security arrangements connected with the bank, the vault, or the transfer of money to the plane. I'm out, and Mr. McGarrett's in. Fair enough, governor? No interference from me. The gold's the responsibility of the State of Hawaii. And there's your official authorization [he hands the Governor a paper]."

This is where the show starts to get really stupid (as if it hasn't already). I could add "presumably," "quite likely," "supposedly" and "possibly" to a lot of the following sentences.

With the help of a scientific genius, Wriggins (Bill Bigelow), Halloran intends to remove the gold bullion from its impenetrable vault in the bank using a laser device which can cut through 4 inches of steel "just like it is butter." This whole procedure is idiotic, not to mention the fact that the vault is accessed from under the bank via some "old World War II tunnel" which "leads down to an abandoned sewer project." This tunnel is entered through a hole in what looks like a papier-maché wall which is camouflaged by branches, which I suspect is actually the Diamond Head tunnel, since it seems very odd that the road in the tunnel is unused because there is a yellow line down the middle of it. The tunnel entrance seems miles away from where the bank is located in downtown Honolulu, which can be seen in the distance.

In the area under the vault, someone has seemingly chipped away all the rock and dirt between the top of the tunnel and the floor of the vault in the bank above. There are lights set up, perhaps powered by a generator, as well as Wriggins' gizmo which will make two holes in wire mesh surrounding two feet of reinforced concrete around the twelve inches of steel which make up the walls of the vault, which we saw during a tour of the vault earlier in the show. This mesh looks kind of like a window screen, except the holes in it are much larger. According to a bank official during the tour, "Any hole … cut through at least one of those wires [would set] off an alarm immediately."

The first of the two holes made by the laser, aside from getting the laser to break through to the inside of the vault, will be used to increase the temperature there. This will cause the gold to melt and run through the second hole, down ceramic tubes into molds below which will form new gold bars. Wriggins says the melting point of gold is 1945°F (the actual figure is 1947.52°F). I don't suppose anyone figured that in order for the gold to pour down these tubes, the floor in the vault would have to be sloped slightly downward, sort of like a drain.

The laser is only 18mm wide, leaving a mere 10mm of clearance within each square of the mesh. Both Wriggins and Halloran wear thick gloves and protective glasses when the laser is being operated, which doesn't make any sense, because Wriggins is the only one flipping dials and neither of them are touching anything hot.

There are time frames for each part of the procedure — 10 hours in total. To get through two feet of reinforced concrete, probably an hour. Then there is the twelve inches of high-grade steel, another two and a half hours. Then the second hole has to be bored, for a total of approximately seven hours. That leaves less than three hours to get the gold out, since the vault opens at 6 a.m. (don't ask me why it is set up to do this so early). When the gold starts pouring out of the tubes, it looks sort of like caramel pudding. There are questions from me as to "how long does gold actually take to solidify" which will not be answered.

Having heard from Nadira earlier that she overheard Halloran was going to pay for the arms with gold bullion on Saturday, McGarrett, Duke and Carew are outside the bank the next morning (Saturday), thinking that something fishy is going to happen. McGarrett figures out what is going on in the bank vault because a thermometer on the side of the bank, the sensor for which is on the outside of the building beside the vault — convenient! — keeps going up despite the fact that it is the middle of the night, which is hard to believe because the whole sequence is obviously shot during the daytime.

At 11:29 p.m., the thermometer's temperature is 76° and then drops to 75°, but at 3:40 a.m., it starts rising from 69° to 71°, then at 3:41 it goes from 72° to 73° and from 74° to 77°. At 4:20 it is 80°, whereas on the radio, the weather says the current temperature in Honolulu is 64°. At 5:35 a.m., the temperature is 86° degrees. Actually, considering the temperature inside the vault is 1945°, I am surprised that the temperature on the thermometer isn't something like 1000°!

With less than a half hour to go before the vault is to be opened, McGarrett asks Duke to contact the city engineer for a map of "everything that's under the downtown area," (!) and not only does this guy show up (he must live very close by) (!!), but he has a map which shows the "Wainwright Tunnel … [which] was used during World War II as an ammo storage tunnel." (!!!) When the bank vault is opened at 6 a.m., the door is extremely hot, and the gold is almost all melted and gone. There is a lot of smoke in the air, making me wonder if the "temperature" from the laser caused any paper or bills in the vault to burn up? (According to one web page, depending on material, moisture, and thickness, the average temperature at which paper money will burn is between 424 and 475 degrees Fahrenheit (218 and 246 degrees celsius)).

Duke goes to the tunnel entrance with some cops in a police car which again emphasizes how really far away the entrance is from downtown. When Duke arrives at the tunnel, their car is parked outside, and he and the cops go inside, but rather than walk miles through the tunnel, they can immediately determine that Halloran and his associates "were in there, all right, but they got out ahead of us."

McGarrett and Carew, on the other hand, are travelling in an LTD (the same one which broke through the gate at The Dutchman's — or is it Duke's car?). They are at the casket company of Polifax, the other arms dealer mentioned earlier where Sandifur is waiting for Halloran to show up. McGarrett and Carew enter the place and there is a brief firefight. McGarrett tells Kimo to "see if you can spot them [the bad guys] from top side" — not taking any risks himself. When Halloran shows up, he gets a big surprise because McGarrett has control of everything, and the gold is now the property of the government of Hawaii as per the paper that Halloran gave the Governor.

McGarrett takes this opportunity to deliver another smarty-pants rant: "You're always there to help some struggling, third-world country, aren't you, Halloran? Macho adventurer, man of action, huh? Messiah? Well, no more, pal. No more."

The show ends back at the airport, where Nadira, who has disappeared ever since her adventures at The Dutchman's, is returning to Baradak with the Prime Minister, who offers her "an important post with our government." WHAT?!? McGarrett manages to get in a couple of smooches before she departs.

What a horrible show! Bad script, bad acting, ugh! This show is so bad (especially the business with the gold) you really wonder how can the actors participate in it since it is so stupid. Don't they have any standards?

I originally thought the score by Les Hooper (his only one for the series) was "funky," but I think the operative word should be "junky." The music for the "waves" is particularly lame.

WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN?

According to the dictionary, a noose, in addition to being "a loop with a slipknot that binds closer the more it is drawn" is also "something that snares like a noose." So, using this second definition, the attempt to steal the gold is what results in the undoing of the bad guys in the show; they are "snared" by their (ridiculous) plan to siphon the gold from the bank.

CASUALTY LIST:

    Death: Jim Weaver shot by Le Doc on Jonas Halloran’s orders.
    Death: Le Doc hit and run over by cargo truck after he tries to shove Nadira in front of it.
    Death: Dutchman shot dead by Halloran.
    Injury: Kimo Carew jumps on thug at Polifax Casket Co. from above.

MORE TRIVIA:

  • Joe Moore has another "red shirt" role like he did in S10E09, "Deep Cover."
  • When the governor meets the representatives from Baradak at the airport, he has sideburns and his hair is ruffled by the wind.
  • Last Five-O appearance for Ed Fernandez, Bill Bigelow, Joe Moore and Colin de Silva.
  • Gold hit a high of $850 an ounce in 1980 around the time of this show. If there is $150 million of gold in the bank vault, and gold is worth $850 an ounce, this would be around 5.5 tons of gold. That is 11,000 pounds. How can the two guys working with Halloran and Wriggins move 11,000 pounds of gold into the truck in a very short time frame?
  • The truck with the orange cab used by Halloran and Wriggins is from CPM&F, an actual Honolulu company which went out of business in 2000.
  • A closeup of the phone on McGarrett's desk reveals that the number is 732-5577, not some generic number. There are 2 rows of 6 buttons each vertically, with the range 2368 to 2373 and 2374 to 2379 (a total of 12 extensions). Nadira calls McGarrett on extension 2376. From the numbers we can see she is dialling on the pay phone, though, she is dialling 24680!
  • Near the bank, an office for Deak & Co. Foreign Currency is seen.
  • The "Asian-looking" building seen in the background as Nadira runs away after Le Doc rolls in the street is the Izumo Taishakyo Mission of Hawaii, a Shinto shrine located at 215 N Kukui St in downtown Honolulu (thanks to Fred Helfing).

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274. (S12E15) The Flight Of The Jewels ★★½  BOOK THEM, KIMO 

Original air date: 3/1/80 — Opening CreditsEnd Credits
Director: Don Weis; Producers: Andrew Gottlieb (Hollywood), William F. Phillips (Hawaii); Writer: James Menzies; Music: Robert Drasnin
Timings: Teaser: 0:32; Main Titles: 0:58; Act One: 8:15; Act Two: 16:18; Act Three: 11:37; Act Four: 11:26; End Credits: 0:39; Total Time: 49:55.

QUICK PLOT:

Clever students use radio-controlled airplanes to steal priceless royal jewels from an exhibition in Honolulu.

Click here to read Full Plot.

REVIEW:

Aside from the fact that there are only 4 episodes to go, this is the last of the "clever students doing bad stuff" shows, either as a prank or for financial gain. The students are Neal Forrester (Jeff Daniels, his first TV credit), Nick Zano (Linwood Boomer, later creator of the sitcom Malcolm in the Middle) and Jerry Otami (Mike Miyashiro). They intend to use model airplanes to pull off a heist of Hawaiian royal jewels which belonged to Queen Liliuokalani worth $10 million dollars.

Cathie Brenner (Kathy Paulo), who is Neal's girl friend, though you wouldn't know this for most of the show, is disturbed when the three give her a demonstration of flying a plane containing the glyceryl trinitrate into a shack on the beach, which explodes. She says, "I thought it was a challenge. One of your freaky mental games." But Neal tells her, "The challenge is against the system and it's the system that's freaky, Cathie, not us. We want what's ours."

Security for the museum where the jewelry exhibit is being held is very tight, yet McGarrett wants even more, like "a direct line from [the] alarm system to the nearest HPD Substation." Nick is one of the guards inside the museum, working in cahoots with the other two boy geniuses on the outside. Neal has placed an extension on one of the fire extinguishers in the museum which will spew knock-out gas at a specific time when the remote-controlled planes will be put into action.

After the last patron leaves the museum for the day, this gas is released, incapacitating the museum guards, though Nick has a mask of sorts which Neal designed which will give him about five minutes of oxygen. Neal and Jerry launch a plane containing explosives from the roof of a nearby building, which makes a large hole in the side of the museum when it arrives there a couple of minutes later.

Meanwhile, Nick has been scooping up jewels and putting them in a bag. The smoke doesn't seem that thick, but none of the other guards notice what he is doing. A second plane is launched from the hotel and when it arrives at the museum, Nick puts the jewels and his gas mask in a compartment behind the cockpit. He is talking loudly to Neal and Jerry via a radio in the plane, yet none of the other guards hear this. He turns this second plane around and it then flies back towards the building, though before arriving there, it veers off somewhere to the left. A police car is either pursuing this plane or heading to the museum, and it flips over while avoiding a pedicab, seriously injuring the cop inside.

Nick and the manager of the museum, Al Larkin (Christerpher Neddels) manage to get out of the room with all the gas, but when they go outside to join a bunch of other guards by the hole in the wall, the pickup plane has already left. It took off just before this, with the guards all standing with their guns pointed towards the hole, the plane flying right past them.

When Five-O analyzes the video tape of the robbery later with a view looking out the hole made by the first plane, it's the same as what we have just seen — there's no way these shots could have been filmed by the museum's video cameras. McGarrett talks of analyzing the video footage with an "electronic filter" which can supposedly penetrate the smoke. Before the tapes are turned over to McGarrett, Nick does some editing on them. Neal tells him, "What's good enough for Nixon is good enough for us."

A representative from the insurance company connected with the jewels named Mohai (Tommy Fujiwara) comes to visit Five-O and McGarrett gives him a homing device which he wants inserted into the package of bills worth $300,000 being exchanged for the jewels. Mohai later goes to a place which looks like a large parking lot. A new plane, piloted by Neal who is nearby, picks up the money and flies away, much to Mohai's annoyance. It is trailed by Truck in a helicopter, but the students confuse him with a similar-looking plane while the one with the loot is recovered by Jerry.

McGarrett has a brainstorm after he realizes the place you would find "a chemist, an aeronautical engineer and an electronic genius," the ones responsible for pulling off this caper, all in the same place, is a university. Truck says that some model shop owner told him there used to be a club for radio-controlled planes like this which broke up a few years before.

Carew and Truck go to Kamehameha University where they end up talking to Cathie, who works in the administration office. From her they get a list of the plane club members, which includes Jerry. Just around this time, Jerry is getting antsy when he finds out that Neal wants to dispose of the jewels to a slimy "big time" fence named Yamura (Kwan Hi Lim). He tells Nick, "The game was to start our own business: science for sale. That's all we were gonna use the money for. Now we're going heavy."

Neal couldn't care less, thinking of the million dollars he hopes to get for the jewels. Too bad that he didn't watch "For Old Times Sake" a few episodes before where the former counterfeiter Monty Pearson told the wayward girls that they would be lucky to get ten percent on the dollar for what they thought the necklace they stole was worth! Neal ridicules Cathy after she is upset hearing about the cop's accident on the radio and also seems unmoved when Jerry tells him that Cathie is leaving. He says that they don't need Jerry's "toys" anymore and he and Nick will split the money between them.

When Cathie brings news of Five-O's visit, Neal suddenly gets in touch with Yamura on the phone, who wheedles him down to $200,000 instead of a million. Five-O comes to visit Jerry because his name is on the club members' list and he decides to co-operate, especially after Carew and McGarrett tell him that if the cop who was injured in the crash dies, it's manslaughter or murder. However, when they get to Neal's place, only Cathie is there and she tells them that Neal he and Nick have already left to meet Yamura at "Crown Point."

Two of Yamura's stooges have enough time to go from this middle-of-nowhere location to a phone booth where Nick, who has the jewels, is awaiting instructions, but this doesn't make sense — it's not like Neal has a cel phone. These goons pick up Nick and the jewels and return to Crown Point, where it looks like Neal and Nick are going to meet an untimely end. However, McGarrett, Kimo and Jerry show up and there is a standoff. One of Yamura's thugs named Monty (Norris Shimabuku) is shot dead but Yamura and the other guy, known in the credits only as "Big Man" (Gus Rethwisch), escape.

Rather than jump in his car and pursue them, McGarrett wants Neal and Jerry to configure a plane which he conveniently had Carew put in the trunk of his car when they left Jerry's. This is done in a very short space of time. Jerry then pilots this plane following Yamura's car down the narrow one-lane road leading down from the Point and, despite the fact that it is a very long way away, cause it to crash right in front of Yamura's car, which goes off the road. (The film looks sped up when this happens.) Why McGarrett would bother to do this is strange, because Truck is on his way coming up this road, and he takes Yamura and Big Man into custody.

The students start patting themselves on the back for their efforts in catching the bad guys, but McGarrett takes the opportunity to give them another season twelve speech as to what they can really expect: "You go to prison and you serve your time. You come out, and your lives and your reputations are ruined. You're felons, indelibly marked. I suppose you geniuses considered this some sophomore experiment, that you're sorry for and you can walk away from, huh? Well, it doesn't work that way. A police officer's life hangs in the balance. Now, fortunately for you, he'll probably recover. But look at the physical pain and the mental anguish that you've caused, plus the destruction of museum property and your own reputations. What a waste. God, what a waste. You're under arrest. Book them, Kimo."

There are a lot of problems with the script for this show. As well, there are other issues that have to do with the planes themselves, even though these are technical issues that most people watching the show wouldn't care about. For most of the show, I couldn't figure out whose girl friend Cathie was supposed to be. At first, I thought it was Jerry, but it turns out it was Neal because when McGarrett comes to Neal's place, she gets all tearful when she finds out from McGarrett that dealing with the "ruthless" Yamura might be a very bad idea.

The music by Robert Drasnin is serviceable, and has several moments where it sounds a bit like John Barry's music for James Bond films.


Mike Miyashiro, who played Jerry Otami, sent me some interesting reminiscences in 2009:

"Jeff Daniels was a young unknown back then but it was clearly apparent to me that his talent was special. He was a loner who carried his guitar to the set everyday. But very serious about the craft of acting. I remember him describing the best acting lesson he received. It was in a class where the professor asked another actor how he would convey "intimidation." Without speaking a word, the other actor took out a real switchblade knife and simply pointed it at Jeff. An excellent lesson about communication without words and one I remember to this day. Whenever I see Jeff in a new film now-a-days, I jokingly tell friends how I feel sorry for him still stuck in a rut doing the same "movie star" stuff all these years.

"Lynwood Boomer was always hanging around the tech guys on the set. Very interested in the process of filming. I remember him as being very bright, inquisitive, funny and yet down to earth. No surprise, he turns up as a producer/writer for his own hit show "Malcom in the Middle" not long after.

"On the set, Jack Lord was VERY intimidating. But I was struck how after 12 long seasons (and doing every scene with cue cards), he was still very much concerned about the quality of the acting on the show. I remember at the end of a long day and near losing daylight, the director was hurrying to wrap up a close-up of Jack's final "book em" speech after catching us bad kids. After the first take, the director said "print." But Jack insisted on one more take that actually was a better performance.

"I also had to do some post-production overdubs and was surprised/terrified that Jack was actually the one directing these. (another example of his caring about the show's details) You are alone in a dark room with headphones listening to the initial recordings and trying to duplicate them. Not easy to do several weeks after primary filming and without the flow of the moment. But in this setting, Jack was surprisingly a very nurturing, patient coach... a completely opposite persona. While known for his tantrums and impatience as the star... as a director, he was quite good. Even taught me some techniques and tricks that were effective. These are the memories of Jack Lord I appreciate as it was a unique chance to see the artist behind the makeup."


In the late 1990s, I got an e-mail from Bryan Villados, whose late father Larry was one of the model airplane technicians involved with this show. Over 20 years later, I contacted Bryan through the same e-mail address, and he was still there! I had a couple of questions to ask him:

M.Q.: After a model airplane like the ones used in the show has been stopped after landing, is it possible to then start them up again remotely?

B.V.: In 1979, absolutely no! The engines used in the airplanes on that episode had to be started by putting a charge on the glow plug (what spark plugs are called for these small engines,) and then the propeller had to be manually spun, either with your finger, a stick, or some other tool. Once the engine was started, you had to disconnect the charge from the glow plug. There is a ni-cad battery in the fuselage, but it is used only to control servos, which are connected with the throttle of the engine, as well as the rudder, elevator, and ailerons. Absolutely no way to power the engine automatically, since there was no way to ignite the glow plug. And even if one were to jimmy rig one, you still need an alternator of some kind to spin the propeller.

I actually remember my dad laughing at the part of the episode you're referencing. We recorded the episode as it aired, and my dad even borrowed an extra VCR so that we would have two copies. So during the live airing, he would tell me the behind-the-scenes stuff. Lots of cool stories.

I was only 10 at the time of the filming. On one Saturday during the production of the episode, my dad took my brother and I to the studio near Diamond Head. The indoor scene in their beach shack where Boomer, Daniels, and Miyashiro talked post-robbery at the museum — I was in the studio behind the cameras as they filmed it. That's when the girlfriend came in, and told them a guard there died. Right after filming that scene, one of the workers came to my dad and told him we had to leave because Jack Lord didn't like kids being around the studio. However, we visited McGarret's office, and met Moe Keale outside. Great memories!

M.Q. (from a subsequent e-mail): For the scene where the propeller is supposedly started remotely, I think what they did was they stopped the propeller which was running and then ran the film backwards to make it look like it was starting. Now if the propeller was going clockwise, this means that you would see the propeller going counter-clockwise, but it was going clockwise in this one shot which is only a few seconds long. BUT ... according to a YouTube video I saw, you can make the propeller go in either direction, so they probably had it going counter-clockwise in the first place and then ran the film backwards. I don't think they had a huge budget for special effects in those days. It always struck me as kind of hairy starting the propeller on these planes with your finger. You would have to move your finger out of the way fast so it didn't get chopped up. I remember when I was a kid in the 50s, there were some guys in my neighborhood who once had a model plane with a control line like in the YouTube video. Is it possible to stop the motor using the remote control? This happens during the show.

B.V.: You can remotely shut off the airplane remotely by cutting back on the throttle, which cuts off the fuel from reaching the carburetor. As for using the finger to spin the propeller, I've witnessed twice people cutting their fingers on the propeller. They didn't sever the finger completely off, but still it wasn't a pretty sight. In the RC [Radio Control Airplane] magazines, some places sold a rubber sleeve you'd place over your pointer finger, and then use it to spin the propeller. Same material used on tires. My dad actually used an electric motor with a rubber cup which you place over the nose of the propeller. Hook the motor to a battery, and you can start the engine. That was the safest way to do it.

Here is one behind the scenes story my dad went through during filming. It has been decades since I've watched the episode, so the individual pieces of the scene may be foggy for me.

The scene took several days to rig up and make everything a success. The first problem was the airplane taking off from the roof of a hotel building — the roof was not long enough for the airplane to take off. You need at least 200 feet or so of runway, and the plane has to reach maximum speed for it to take off. So what the techs did was rig up fishing line and attached the strands to both ends of the airplane's wings. For the airplane to slide along the wires, they glued plastic straws, and pulled the fishing wire through it.

My dad and his buddies started the engine, maximized the throttle, and the airplane would glide up the strands, making it look like the airplane took off on its own. You mentioned budget — this was an example of doing things on the cheap. Richard Scott, who was working with my dad (and also was my dad's flying instructor) came up with this idea. Try studying the footage of the airplane taking off — depending on the quality of the video you have, you might be able to see the fishing lines.

So the take-off problem was solved. The next challenge is flying through the park. Now, normally when you fly an airplane, you're standing on the ground, and the airplane is above you. In the case of this scene, it was the complete opposite. My dad was standing on top of the roof, and he had to fly the airplane from the roof, and all the way down into the park — basically flying with the airplane flying below and away him. He never ever did this before, and I don't think there would be any opportunity to even practice this ahead of time.

Mr. Weis the director wanted the scene, and my dad said he could pull it off. So in order for the airplane to leave the top of the roof, Danny Thompson had to hold the airplane and throw it off the roof, like you would with a glider, but there's actually an engine spinning on this one.

So now that the airplane is in the air and heading down towards the park, there's another problem which they didn't even think of ahead of time: frequency interference. Normally, we would fly airplanes in an abandoned airfield or a park with zero building or towers around. But in this scene, they're flying the airplane through an area that had towers for every TV and radio station, including the local CBS affiliate — and they all ran on VHF and FM bands.

Radio control airplanes use similar FM bands, but close enough to where it would interfere with the other frequencies in the area. No one bothered to check for any of this — no one even gave it a thought. So the airplane is flying towards the park. There were some tennis courts located at the end of the plane's flight path. So as the airplane reached the tennis courts, suddenly my dad lost control of the airplane. The airplane came straight down about 100 feet or so, and it smashed right into the middle of the courts, as people were there playing. They could've killed someone! In the beginning, Mr. Scott built about six of these airplanes. They ended up crashing all of them by the end. My dad, the electrical engineer, changed the radio and the airplane to a different band (2-meter if you're familiar with amateur radio,) and the frequency interference problem was resolved.

The final challenge was flying the airplane into the building, the McCoy Pavilion in Ala Moana Park, which is the fake museum. Fortunately, they were allowed to fly the airplane from the park level. This whole part of the scene was done in just one take. From what I remember about the scene, there were explosives in the airplane. Of course, there weren't any in real life. Instead, the techs set up explosive charges along the wall of the museum. So the requirement was for my dad to fly the airplane full-blast into the wall, and when the airplane hits the wall, the charges would be set off. The shot was done right on the money. My dad hit the target perfectly, and the explosives went off perfectly timed.

Because the airplane is now in pieces, another airplane was right behind it — this time it was a trainer type airplane, with the wing on top of the fuselage. It had a cover on the front, where the fuel tank would normally sit. Mr. Weis wanted to use this space to store the gas mask. So Mr. Scott had to re-locate the gas tank, and of course that would cause an imbalance in the weight of the airplane. Another problem is that there were two canisters — one on each end of the wing — filled with water. Impossible for the airplane to fly like this. So another airplane like it was built for flying, while the one with the canisters was made solely to roll along the ground. After the jewels was loaded into the canisters, the airplane rolled along the ground and away from the guards. The scene then cut away to showing the airplane taking off — of course it was a different airplane. And that was basically a wrap.

M.Q.: One final question. I am curious to know how this show came to be. The concept of clever students using planes to steal jewels is kind of an interesting one, I'm just wondering if the writer James Menzies came up with the idea on his own, or maybe someone from Hawaii (like your father, or the people he knew) suggested this idea to the producers of the old show? There are not too many examples of someone coming up with an idea like this on the old show [I am thinking of "The Bells Toll At Noon."].

B.V.: No idea! I wish I knew. I do however know the original name of the episode: "Those Daring Young Men in their Flying Machines," which is the title on the copy of the script that I have. I was told that they had to use a different title because of copyright concerns with the title, which is similar to the name of a movie from the 1960s. My dad had a VHS copy of that movie, and I must have watched it at least a dozen times. Maybe Menzies was a fan of the movie or a fan of aviation?


Considering what Bryan told me, I took a closer look at the sequences in the show which involved airplanes:

This shot from Google Maps (thanks to Fred Helfing) is in Kapiolani Park. You can see the tall building on the right, presumably where the planes started, though I don't think this is ever firmly established.

The museum, actually the McCoy Pavilion, is in Ala Moana Park, quite a long ways away. I don't think that the city would have allowed the planes to fly all the way there. Bryan mentions crashes in a tennis court, and there were tennis courts in Kapiolani Park quite close to the place where the filming in the park would have been. Considering there were scenes where the plane left the hotel, flew towards the camera, and then after the pick-up plane got the money, it flew back, these shots were probably accomplished in one take which was then divided into before and after parts.

There were tennis courts in Ala Moana Park next to the "museum," but none of the shots in that area involved the planes coming in from on high. They were ones of the planes either landing (with the explosion on the side of the building) or taking off (again in a very short space).

If you grab the Google Maps picture with your mouse and move the picture to the left, you will see there are tennis courts there behind some sprinklers.

After the plane leaves the roof (not really shown), the shot where it is flying and has some "smoke" coming out of the rear is exactly the same for the first plane with the explosive as the second one the pick-up plane. They are using the same plane also. With the second plane, you can see more smoke after the first batch because the length of the shot is longer.

Here is my in-depth "anal-ysis" of the various scenes with the planes:

Act One

Under the main titles, a plane (#N1977M) is shown looping, we are not shown how it took off. It lands in a parking lot close to the van owned by Neal.

Neal takes another plane out of his van, it has orange wings. He puts the glyceryl trinitrate in a vial in a compartment behind the engine, then Jerry starts the propeller with a stick, but it cuts away just as he touches the stick to the propeller. There is a hand holding the plane behind the engine, but I don't think this is Jerry's, the hand looks a lot "older" than his. You can see the battery which is connected to the glow plug. The plane taxis to a street, then a parking lot and takes off. It loops, then returns and crashes into the shack which explodes.

Later — same location, same plane as the first one in this act, there is another cut as Jerry starts up the plane and I don't think the hands holding it are his either. Neal says "Today is graduation day."

Act Two

Still using #N1977M, Neal and Jerry are on the roof of a building, the plane looks like it has a couple of bombs under the wings. Someone's hand starts the plane, but again I don't think it is Jerry's. Jerry detaches the battery.

The scene switches to the jewel exhibition, Larkin, the security boss, asks Nick to seal the doors. Nick declines the offer to take an early break, he says under his breath to his associates outside: "Get on with it, guys." Cut back to the plane on the roof which moves forward slowly; in the next shot, it takes off from the roof and we see it flying over Kapiolani Park. Cut back to the museum, the toxic gas starts leaking from below the fire extinguisher where it was placed.

We see the plane flying relatively low. In the next shot it runs into the wall of the museum and there is an explosion. Guards react to the gas, falling on the floor. Nick puts on a gas mask and runs to the hole in the wall and tells the four guards coming towards it "Poison gas!" They scatter left and right. Some smoke is coming out of the hole on the outside.

Inside, Nick grabs jewels from the exhibit, even though the level of smoke inside is not that great and people like the guards inside and Larkin could see him. Nick does not get all the jewels, he returns to the hole in the wall with the ones he took, which are in a bag.

Back to the roof of the hotel for plane number two (the pick-up plane). It has the same number as the first one. The shots of Neal and Jerry standing are slightly different. The one of the plane on its way to the museum is exactly the same as for the first plane, but we see a bit more of the plane on its way (there are two "expulsions" of smoke from the plane in the second instance, only one in the first). Note the car moving in the background in both shots. The pick-up plane manages to take off from the tall building's roof in what seems like a pretty limited space.

Nick says "Come on," the plane arrives near the hole in the wall and slowly taxis forward. There is a lot of smoke on the outside, but Neal can see through this all the way from the roof through his binoculars. Inside the museum, Nick says "Hold it," which can be heard by Jerry and Neal on the roof via the radio in the plane. Nick turns the plane around (the motor has never stopped) and puts the jewels and the gas mask in a compartment behind the plane's cockpit. The jewels in a bag seem to be a pretty large package to put in there, actually. Nick says "Okay, there's a clear 30-foot runway, due north." The implication is he is not talking loudly, but I don't know why the other guards in the room can't hear him, though; the hole made by the explosion is in the same room as the jewels, the gas and the other guards who have been overpowered by the gas.

With the jewels now inside, the plane goes out through the smoke, through the four guards who are pointing their guns at the hole in the wall (what happened to them thinking there was poison gas?). It flies away in the direction of the tall building where it supposedly came from, but then does a loop and flies off to the left, seemingly not towards the tall building. It flies far away, over some guy driving people in a pedicab, and there is an accident with a cop car which flips over. Nick and Larkin finally join the other guards outside the hole, but the plane has already left.

Later on, near the end of the act, Mohai from the insurance company awaits a plane with orange wings in a parking lot. The plane lands a few feet away from him after buzzing him once above his head. When the plane lands, Neal can be heard via a radio inside it. Its propeller stops. This plane doesn't have a number. This plane has some can-like containers hanging from the wings.

Act Three

Neal talks to Mohai, who shows the package with the money so Neal can supposedly see it via a miniature television camera in the plane which does not actually exist. If the "binocular" angle is supposed to represent Nick, who is watching the money to verify it is OK, it is totally wrong. Nick is watching with binoculars from a different angle and can see the bills, which includes $1,000 notes.

One of the cans under the wings of this plane which Neal describes as "jars" contains the jewels, the other has explosive gel. A beeping noise happens on Neal's transmitter, he says it is a "directional signal" indicating that the package of money is bugged. Mohai seems to put the "bug" in a compartment behind the plane's cockpit, but does not put the money in it. The space to put the money seems kind of small compared to the size of the money, which is supposedly $300,000.

There is a close shot of the propeller starting remotely, but I think this was done by starting the propeller counter-clockwise, then reversing the film. This shot is only a few seconds long. The plane takes off, Mohai tries to chase after it. Truck is in a helicopter which is following the plane via the directional signal. The plane eventually crashes on a beach, and after Truck lands to look at it, he finds out that it is not the same plane, there are no jars on it.

We cut to Jerry who is coming out of a forested area and taking the real plane and putting it in his car. It has the jars, he takes one of them, the one with liquid in it, and pulls it off the plane and throws it away. Obviously there was no explosive in it at all.

Act Four

McGarrett and Carew arrive at the out-of-the-way place where the slimy fence Yamura and his associates are going to knock off Neal and Nick, a.k.a. "the clever students." McGarrett tries to run into the bad guys with his car, which is stupid, because the hostages are in front of them.

Before this, the bearded Asian guy named Monty moves away from them and aims at Carew, but Carew can step out from behind Neal's van and shoot this guy dead ... like there is a gap in the action here.

Yamura and the "Big Man" escape, and Five-O does not pursue for some reason, even though the bad guys flattened only the tire on Neal's van, not McGarrett's car. This way this whole sequence is handled is dumb. McGarrett asks Jerry, "How long would it take to assemble that plane of yours," and Jerry responds, "No time." Neal says it would only take "ten seconds" to rig the explosive. This plane was brought by McGarrett in the trunk of his car after he went to the beach house where Jerry decided to co-operate, how convenient.

Yamura in his Cadillac drives quickly down a narrow one-lane road. The plane is prepared and takes off in a very limited space. One of the shots of the plane flying show some kind of a major road in the background. The plane flies down after Yamura's car and hits the road in front of him, exploding, not a very big explosion, but enough to cause Yamura's car to swerve sharply and stop. Truck is there to bust Yamura and Big Man. It is totally unrealistic how Jerry can see so far away to cause the plane to crash at exactly a certain place.

CASUALTY LIST:

    Injury (x7): Larkin and security guards at exhibit gassed by Jerry, Neal and Nick Zano.
    Injury: HPD officer hurt when car overturns responding to alarm.
    Injury: Monty shot by Kimo.
    Injury (x2): Yakmura and goon hurt when car forced off road by exploding airplane.

MORE TRIVIA:

  • Last Five-O appearance of Tommy Fujiwara. The money which Fujiwara's character wants to put in the plane consists of $1,000 bills, which went out of circulation around 1969.
  • Kwan Hi Lim, playing his last villain, takes the jewels from Nick and Neal, saying "Ten million in a plastic jar — you punks are all class!"
  • McGarrett wears a leisure suit; he also has a Julius Caesar haircut briefly. He refers to the remote-controlled planes as "adult toys." Jack Lord looks very old in this show.
  • At a meeting in the Five-O office, McGarrett gives Kimo suggestions for things to investigate, but Truck leaves instead of Kimo, who stays to talk to McGarrett.
  • Unlocking the museum doors is controlled by Larkin's palm print — a bit too sci-fi. And what if Larkin was really incapacitated and was not able to open the doors?
  • Jerry Otami drives a cool yellow Mustang convertible, license number N-5903.
  • Nick refers to Jerry as "Jerry-san; Jerry returns the favor, calling him "Nick-san.".
  • There are four model plane technicians credited at the end of the show.

GALLERY:

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275. (S12E16) Clash Of Shadows  KIMO, BOOK THEM 

Original air date: 3/8/80 — Opening CreditsEnd Credits
Director: Ralph Levy; Producers: Andrew Gottlieb (Hollywood), William F. Phillips (Hawaii); Writer: George F. Slavin; Music: Duane L. Tatro
Timings: Teaser: 0:32; Main Titles: 0:58; Act One: 14:05; Act Two: 8:09; Act Three: 10:04; Act Four: 15:28; End Credits: 0:39; Total Time: 49:55.

QUICK PLOT:

The murder in Hawaii of a famous Nazi-hunter and his connection to a rare World War II German medal pulls Five-O into the search for a war criminal.

Click here to read Full Plot.

REVIEW:

Simon Weisenthal-like Nazi-hunter Yuri Bloch (George DiCenzo, last seen in S10E05, "The Descent of the Torches") and another man named Joel are at the Honolulu docks. Joel asks Bloch, "Are you sure you can trust this man?" Bloch replies, "Well, right now he's all we have." Some guy appears nearby, and says "Mr. Palmer." Bloch addresses him as "Professor." Suddenly bullets are flying, and both Bloch and Joel are shot and fall into the water.

Bloch is seriously injured and Joel is dead. Bloch swims to shore, pulling Joel's body with him. He switches his identity with that of Joel and makes his way to a safe house in Honolulu where he meets Anne Chernus (Elaine Giftos). She cleans him up and puts him in bed, though he is in very rough shape. Bloch says "Yuri ... dead," identifying himself as "Joel," saying the word "Ship" over and over. Considering Bloch is legendary, known for apprehending war criminals like Adolf Eichmann, Franz Stangl, commandant of the Sobibór and Treblinka extermination camps, and the fictional Nazi "Kendler," it is very odd that Anne cannot recognize him.

After talking to the Governor about "Bloch's" death, and being told by the Governor, "You're in the diplomatic area now," McGarrett takes a call from an Israeli government Minister played by Lloyd Bochner, who was in S12E12, "School for Assassins," earlier this season. His character has a scraggly beard which makes him look like the Wolfman, much darker in color than the hair on his head. He is hesitant to provide too much information to McGarrett, telling him to wait for an agent from Israel who will arrive in Hawaii soon. After McGarrett exhorts him to co-operate, the Minister finally says that Bloch was "closing in" on Emil Klaus, the Nazi "death camp butcher" who moved from Argentina to Hawaii about three years before. The Secretary adds, "You mustn't think of Emil Klaus as a tired, hunted old man. He is today a leader of youth, the new generation, new faces, new ways, but the same poison in the soul, fascism."

When McGarrett and Kimo go to the coroner's office, no one there can correctly identify "Bloch," whose body was dragged out of the drink earlier that day. This again is unusual because the real Bloch is so well-known. There are a couple of clues found on him (Joel), like a Knight's Cross, the highest order the Nazis handed out in World War II, and a key for room 411 at the Makani Kai Hotel at 129 Paoakalani. Anne is seen snooping around outside the coroner's office with no explanation for this.

As Kimo goes to the hotel to investigate, the camera seems to be mounted on another car, and you can see the car's rear fender in the shot. At the hotel, Kimo shows his credentials to the desk clerk (Vince Alameida), but he is recognized as someone from Five-O by a blonde-haired guy named Hans (presumably Philip McMorrow) who we later find out is part of a team keeping surveillance on the hotel where Bloch registered under the name of Andre Palmer.

Kimo goes to the room, which has been tossed. He enters without a warrant, just using the key, and looks around, sighing and acting like it is a real effort for him to do his job. He picks up articles of clothing and just throws them on the floor. Suddenly, John Turner (Bill Fiddler), who was involved with the shootout at the docks at the beginning of the show, appears out of a closet which Kimo opened after he came into the room. (We didn't see Turner in the closet then; he was tossing the room and tipped off by Hans.)

Turner bonks Kimo on the back of the head with a gun and then quickly leaves by the window to the fire escape. But get this ... rather than just run down the fire escape to the ground, which is not the usual fire escape with metal stairs on the outside of the building, but just regular stairs, he goes on the outside of these stairs and drops down to the next floor, then runs down another floor. When Kimo appears above, Turner starts shooting at him. Kimo acts very dumb at this point, coming forward and sticking his face where he could get shot. Kimo then pulls the same number on the outside of the building to drop down to the next floor. When both men get to the floor above ground level, they both jump from the outside again, even though they could just run down the stairs. (This is kind of hard to explain; best viewed!)

The next scene is at the Anderson Estate, location for several shows, where Emil Klaus (Albert Paulsen), who has been going under the name of Adrian Cassell, is reading the Honolulu Advertiser with a front-page story headlined "War Crimes Hunter Murdered." Turner reports to his boss, saying of the situation at the hotel, "I'm right on top of it." Klaus tells him to join the other men at the house who are packing "records, crypto, the Chinese pamphlets [and] the correspondence" in preparation for leaving town. Paulsen looks somewhat emaciated and very much older than his previous appearances on the show. Klaus is a collector of militaria, including a large tabletop with a battlefield full of toy soldiers.

Back at the Five-O office, Kimo regrets what happened at the hotel: "It was really dumb to let that guy smack me from behind with a pistol." Duke suddenly comes in and announces "There was a fire last night in Pearl City ... a shop that sells military insignia and medals." McGarrett tells Kimo, "Call the coroner. Have him take a second look, close look at that autopsy report of Larry Akaela. He's the owner of that memorabilia shop." Huh? When did this guy's name suddenly appear in the show previously?

At the Makani Kai, Anne shows up and asks to get Bloch's mail. She has an "authorization," and the clerk makes her sign for this mail, which consists of a cablegram. This is really unbelievable. Isn't there anything fishy about Bloch/Palmer, considering his room was left all topsy-turvy after Turner got through with it and there was all the shooting and so forth on the back of the building? Although Blonde Hans is sitting nearby in the hotel lobby and Anne is not talking particularly loudly, he sees her pick up the mail and follows her, knocking over some geezers who are loafing around. Anne manages to escape in a cab. When she gets back to her place, she sees that the cablegram contains a coded message: "RALLY AMONG MEN OF GOOD CHEER." Unfortunately, in the condition Bloch is in, he cannot help her. He just keeps saying "Ship, ship..." and babbles deliriously.

Carew gets a call from Harry (Winston Char) at the coroner's office — maybe McGarrett was unavailable? Some guy has shown up to identify "Bloch's" body. This is actually the agent from Israel, played by Lou Richards, which the Minister told McGarrett about in their earlier conversation. He will be referred to as "Agent" below. He starts to leave the office, and when Harry wants him to fill out a form that he was viewing the body and tries to prevent him from leaving, the guy grabs at Harry and throws him on the ground. Later when Kimo shows up, Harry says, "I picked a nice, peaceful profession."

Back at Klaus's place, Turner says that men from Vienna will soon be arriving, though you have to wonder why, because everything from there will be gone by that evening, and his whole operation is moving to South Africa. This is from the days when South Africa was regarded as a "bad" place. Klaus says that there "our organization will take roots and grow." There is concern about Anne picking up the cablegram at the hotel because Hans could not stop her or track her down later because she gave a false name and address.

Harry calls McGarrett to let him know that the owner of the military memorabilia shop Akaela died from "a drug that paralyzes slowly and actually allows the victims to breathe, but prevents them from doing anything to save themselves." This bogus zombie drug is called Paralithium, the same name as a substance used as a fuel source in some ionic propulsion systems in the world of Star Trek: "The Germans experimented with it in World War II. It's been outlawed since." McGarrett makes a connection with the memorabilia like the Knight's Cross found on "Bloch's" body: "Maybe he [Bloch] was going to the shop ... or maybe Yuri Bloch arranged to meet him somewhere and Larry Akaela was killed before they could get together ... There's gotta be something in that shop." Seriously, this is all too stupid. Although the cause of the fire was supposedly a lit cigarette which Akaela was smoking when he fell asleep on a couch at his shop (??), is it possible that Klaus's stooges were responsible for the fire? If so, what was the point?

Anne is getting desperate to figure out what the coded message means, so she calls McGarrett and tells him that she left a copy of the cablegram in his car parked outside the office. McGarrett knows there was"another man" with Bloch, which Anne confirms. (The Minister mentioned this earlier.) By the way, if she is running this "safe house," surely she would have some connection to the Israeli government, and they could arrange for a doctor whose credentials had been revoked to come and patch "Joel" up!

A computer is soon seen analyzing the coded message. I originally thought this was the HPD computer, but instead it is one in Israel somewhere, and Fred Ball is briefly seen as an analyst. According to the Minister, who is now identified as a "deputy administrator" by Duke and addressed by McGarrett as "Mr. Minister," the coded message translates to "First security of Oahu three four", meaning "foreign bank drafts to Honolulu," and "the dates of the month when the money was sent."

While this message doesn't reveal that much, McGarrett tells Duke to "Get over to the DA's office. We need a subpoena for the bank records. And Duke, tell Carew to put on a shirt and tie. He's gonna be talking to bankers." (This is supposed to be humorous.) Carew does arrive at the bank to talk to a Mr. Mohai (Daniel Taba), but working there is some woman named Christine Miller (Barbara Kelly) who has a vague resemblance to Rosa Klebb from the James Bond Film From Russia With Love .

We find out that this woman has been working in the bank for three years (from around the time Klaus came to Hawaii), presumably to primarily manage bank transfers for Klaus! Miller goes into a back room where information about foreign transactions is stored, and sets up a bomb to go off which destroys the data which is stored there.

Meanwhile, Anne is outside the bank watching what goes on. Beats me why she is there! After all, she had no idea what the coded message meant. Suddenly Blonde Hans and another fair-haired Aryan, who are obviously watching her, get into her car and force her to go back to Klaus's place. Miller is at Klaus's and she slaps Anne around, saying, "She knew why that Carew was there. She was either his lookout or she followed him there." Klaus himself threatens her in his Elmer Fudd accent: "There are ways, unpleasant ways, to make you cooperate. Sometimes they leave scars, the prettiness is no longer."

Back at Five-O, McGarrett, Duke and Carew are going through papers uncovered at the memorabilia store. McGarrett says, "Wow, I think I see a pattern emerging," to which Kimo replies, as if he is bored out of his mind, "Well, I'm glad you do, Steve." There are numerous items purchased by an "R. Shipman," and McGarrett recalls that Anne, when he spoke to her, mentioned that the guy back at her place couldn't stop saying the word "Ship."

These purchases are traced to a Professor Shipman at Kamehameha University. Carew goes to see Shipman, tailed by the Agent, and the prof admits to buying stuff from Akaela not only for himself but other things to resell to a collector. Kimo shows the professor the Knight's Cross, which he says "Yuri Bloch thought ... might be a link to Emil Klaus." (This will be explained later, sigh.) Finally, the professor says the collector is named "Adrian Cassell" and he has known him for "about three years." (Cassell = Klaus, duh!)

McGarrett goes to see Cassell under the pretext of investigating "stolen merchandise." Obviously Klaus, who has managed to live undetected in Hawaii for three years and is probably a pretty clever guy, should see through this façade immediately, but he invites McGarrett in and the two of them do a dance like a couple of dogs circling around a fire hydrant, with McGarrett commenting that in the toy soldier diorama "Nazi forces are well represented."

McGarrett seems particularly interested, for no particular reason, in one of the military books in Klaus's cabinet, "Battles That Have Changed the Course of History" which has a string bookmark in it. Klaus attempts to distract him with "a group of rare medals" and another book, "The Battle of Hastings."

Everything seems to be "in order," and McGarrett is about to leave when he spots the Agent snooping around outside. He pursues this guy, and when he catches up to him, is finally told that "Cassell is Emil Klaus" (as if McGarrett doesn't know this already), Bloch was on "a special mission" and that the Knight's Cross in Bloch's possession was "a clue."

Leaving the Agent with Klaus outside, McGarrett goes back into the house and the library where he takes the first "Battles" book and opens it to the page with the bookmark, where there is "an organizational list and plans for the rebirth of the Nazi party" with "countries, names, contacts, finances, the works." WHAT?!? This is really absurd, how does he know this information is in that particular book?

Both Klaus, who comes back into the house, and Turner are not happy about this turn of events, especially because McGarrett can now see into the back room where Anne is being subjected to a kind of basic waterboarding. Klaus sneers at McGarrett, "She, like you, intruded in my private affairs. And like you, she must suffer the consequences." As to whether he is Klaus, Cassell says, "If you find him, there's only one man who can identify him [Really? In the whole world?] who knows him by sight. That man, Yuri Bloch, is dead."

If the script wasn't incredible enough, Bloch suddenly walks into the room, identifies Klaus and tells Turner to put down his gun or Klaus is "a dead man." There is this operatic exercise in exposition as a lot of facts are filled in which sort of connect the dots, but this is pretty unsuspensful as McGarrett holds Klaus, Turner and Miller there at gunpoint, presumably until some cops come to bust them for "complicity in the murders of Larry Akaela and Joel Rudel, also for kidnapping."

I can't deal with this any more, here is the dialogue from the final scene!

BLOCH (to McGarrett): I took advantage of you. When Joel was killed, I took his identity … I had heard of you. Your reputation. I knew you would carry on where I could not. It was my last chance to catch up with Klaus before he made others of his kind.

McGARRETT: And that's why you left the Knight's Cross in the dead man's clothes, for me to find, give me a lead, huh? … That Knight's Cross led us to Larry Akaela, to the memorabilia shop and to Professor Shipman, huh?

BLOCH: Yes, I hoped it would. The professor only knew of a collector by the name of Adrian Cassell. And this Adrian Cassell, this Klaus, told him he would meet me instead.

McGARRETT: But how did you get here?

BLOCH: We followed your man, Carew, to Professor Shipman. He told us where we could find Adrian Cassell.

McGARRETT: He told "us"? What do you mean "us"?

(The agent appears, still handcuffed.)

BLOCH: We both came here together.

AGENT: I knew that Yuri might be at the safe house. And when I got there, his fever had just broken. [What do you mean "fever," he was SHOT!!]

McGARRETT: You were the man who ran from the coroner's office today.

AGENT: When I saw that the dead man wasn't Yuri, I couldn't wait around to answer any questions.

Speaking of questions, there are still a few. If Bloch said that he wanted to sell the rare Knight's Cross to someone as part of his scheme to find Klaus, and Akaela then mentioned Shipman, who mentioned Cassell, was Bloch using his own name? This would not be a good move. But if Bloch didn't use his own name, how did Klaus and Turner know that it would be Bloch at the docks and they would try to kill him? The way McGarrett associates Akaela's store with this case without knowing any of the behind-the-scenes details is still kind of dumb!

The scene at the dock at the beginning of the show, as "explained" (sort of) in the dialog above is also stupid. When Block sees the guys who have come to meet him, he asks "Professor?", meaning Shipman. But why would Shipman would be meeting Klaus and Rudel at the docks — what's with all the cloak-and-dagger?

The final scene is at the airport where the previously-mentioned Klaus-jugend from Vienna arriving to join his entourage are busted (the charge is travelling with false passports), McGarrett in a smart-alecky way yells at them from his car: "Auf wiedersehn, kamaraden!" ("Farewell, comrades!")

The music in the show by Duane Tatro, his only score for the series, has some modern-sounding moments, including funk electric bass passages. It is "different," but listenable.

Rather than a rating of one star, which just means "this episode is garbage," this show previously had a "BOMB" rating, meaning "not only is this garbage, but it insults my intelligence." Considering things are sort of explained (though not very well), I have adjusted it back up to one star, which is what it used to be a long time ago.

WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN?

Darrell Fung suggests: "I think it means Bloch is pretending to be Joel and Klaus is pretending to be Cassell, therefore both are staying in the shadows. Also, Nazi-hunting is getting a bit long in the tooth and Nazis in general are hiding in the shadows."

CASUALTY LIST:

    Death: Joel Rudel shot three times, then falls into water.
    Death: Yuri Bloch shot in the shoulder, then falls into water.
    Injury: Kimo hit in the head with gun butt by Turner.
    Death: Larry Akaela, owner of military memorabilia shop, died in fire under influence of paralithium, an outlawed drug (not seen by us).
    Injury: Harry the Coroner shoved to floor by Israeli Agent.
    Injury: Anne Chernus slapped around by Christine Martin.
    Injury: Israeli Agent tackled and cuffed by McGarrett.

MORE TRIVIA:

  • The title of the show is "Clash of Shadows." The place at the beginning of the DVD where the episode titles are listed and you select the one you want to see has it as "Clash Of The Shadows," though the DVD box itself has the title correctly.
  • The other books in Klaus's library in addition to the "Battles" book mentioned above are Ridpath's History of the World and Corpus Juris.
  • The bank manager in this episode, played by Daniel Taba, is named Mohai, the same name as Tommy Fujiwara's character in the previous episode.
  • Two of the pre-commercial waves are preceded by shots of toy soldiers. The music during the waves is not particularly suspenseful.
  • When McGarrett is seen speaking to Carew briefly in the teaser, the audio is mostly the same later in McGarrett's office, but the video is different. McGarrett's hair looks like a Julius Caesar cut in the teaser.
  • When Bloch/Joel arrives at Anne's place, the code word exchanged between the two of them includes the expression "Masada," the name of a site in Israel where Jewish extremists fought with Roman soldiers a couple of thousand years ago, a battle which ended in a mass suicide by the Jews.
  • The Makani Kai Hotel, located at 129 Paoakalani Street in the show, has been replaced by a modern-looking place called the Hotel Renew.
  • Another headline in the paper which Klaus is reading is "Skimming Scandal."
  • McGarrett is pretty laid back throughout the show, analyzing things and having brainstorms. When he suddenly starts yelling at one of Klaus's blonde underlings during the big confrontation at the end, his level of anger is surprising by comparison. As the show wraps up, and the Boys from Brazil ... er ... Austria come into the airport terminal, McGarrett tells Kimo to "book them."

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276. (S12E17) A Bird In Hand... BOMB – NO STARS!

Original air date: 3/15/80 — Opening CreditsEnd Credits
Director: Beau Van den Ecker; Producers: Andrew Gottlieb (Hollywood), William F. Phillips (Hawaii); Writer: Sam Roeca; Music: Don Ray
Timings: Teaser: 0:32; Main Titles: 0:58; Act One: 15:32; Act Two: 9:18; Act Three: 8:49; Act Four: 14:06; End Credits: 0:39; Total Time: 49:54.

QUICK PLOT:

A band of innocuous birdwatchers is the target of a bloody vendetta by a paranoid con artist.

Click here to read Full Plot.

REVIEW:

An unbearably stupid episode, which should be required viewing for TV production classes in how not to make a show from the angles of writing, producing, directing and acting, among others. This used to be my nomination for worst Five-O episode of all (this "honor" was dropped from the review some time ago). It is still very bad, but more recently, that prize has been awarded to S10E19, "When Does A War End?"

The show starts out with a bus from Honolulu Island Tours on a bird watching expedition driving through some sugar cane fields. The passengers on the bus include recently-married rock singer Marty Watts (Randy Ruff) and his wife Julie Mae (Sylvia Clinger), Angie Walker (Lara Parker), a photographer from the Star Press newspaper covering their honeymoon, champion swimmer/surfer Johnny Salomao (Paul Dennis Martin), Professor Hatari (the bald Seth Sakai) and a middle-aged couple from Kansas, Clarence Firth and Gertrude Firth (Wayne Oxford and Gillian Dubb), most of whom are later guessed to be members of the Audubon Society.

The bus inexplicably gets a flat tire and while it is being repaired, the passengers take pictures of an abandoned sugar mill nearby. Why they do this is strange, because it doesn't seem to be even remotely interesting. A sign near the mill says "KAPU [forbidden or 'keep out'], No Trespassing."

Outside the mill, the hyper-paranoid "con artist of the century" Anthony del Vecchi (John Dehner) is relaxing on a chaise. Inside, his associates and a bunch of hired hands are filling pineapple cans with fruit and gold bullion that has been melted down and formed into pineapple-like rings to be spirited out of the country. According to McGarrett later, del Vecchi fleeced investors out of more than $100 million — I guess he was sort of the Bernie Madoff of his day.

You seriously have to wonder why is Del Vecchi outside the mill in the first place if he is so concerned about his operation being uncovered? His associates give new meaning to the term "ubiquitous" — they know more about what is going on than Five-O usually does. They not only manage to get to the tour bus company's drop-off point before the bus arrives there, but also park themselves on a nearby yacht to take pictures of the passengers so they can track them down.

Later, at her apartment, Angie is drying her hair, though it doesn't seem wet, and discovers that her apartment has been broken into. Considering there is a huge hole that has been cut in the glass patio door beside the lock, why does she even bother to lock the door after she closes it? Rather than call the cops, she opens up her closet (one would suspect she is familiar with what's inside) and freaks when the ironing board falls out and hits her. (This is so stupid.)

Shortly after this, Angie hears on the radio that Marty and his wife — who were supposed to be going to a rehearsal for a concert at Maluhia Park — were found dead 10 minutes ago after their car "plunged off Koakula Ridge Drive into Koa Canyon." When Angie's editor at the newspaper Tom Gordon (Angus Duncan) calls to tell her this a few seconds later, he informs her that the driver of the bus was also found dead at the Shriners' Hall. Why doesn't she tell Tom that her apartment was broken into?

Flashing on some picture that she took a while back of McGarrett and some cops, Angie visits Five-O to express her concerns. Kimo and her then head to Marty's accident scene, where the German-accented member of del Vecchi's Team Ubiquitous, Klieber (George Fisher) is seen snooping around.

When Angie and Kimo finish, the two of them drive away, and a large semi-trailer truck driven by del Vecchi's burly thug Santos (Edward Vierra) pursues them in a scene reminiscent of the Stephen Spielberg TV movie Duel (1971). When the truck forces them off the road, the perspective behind them is totally wrong in one shot. The protective fence is on the driver's side of the car, rather than the passenger's, suggesting they have turned completely around and are going in the opposite direction! The car skids off the road, but is nowhere near the edge of a cliff, despite a closeup from below which shows it just about falling over.

Things become more suspicious when a doctor, presumably the medical examiner, informs McGarrett that Marty, his wife and the bus driver, all of whom died in "accidents" (the bus driver "fell down the steps on his way into the Shrine[rs'] hall" and broke his neck) were actually killed first by blows on the back of their heads. McGarrett figures he can get a list of the passengers on the tour bus, the rest of whom are determined to be in serious danger, but when he arrives at the tour bus company's office, he finds it has burned down because of a "lighter fluid bomb," and "the passenger list went up in smoke along with all the other records."

McGarrett quizzes Professor Hatari at his vandalized university office about Salomao, a student on the bus, and the professor wonders "Who would steal flammulated owls and ruddy ducks?," referring to his collection of stuffed birds.

The scene switches to Koko Head Beach the next morning where Salomao is seen surfing as his very attractive girl friend (Monique Kaeo?) watches. But he disappears, and she finds him washed up at the top of the water line instead of floating in the surf. Santos is seen coming out of the water nearby, having somehow knocked Salomao off.

Kimo visits the sugar factory pretending to be a building inspector so he can snoop around, a particularly dumb move, considering he might run into Santos who was driving the truck that tried to kill him. Fortunately, Santos is not there. Instead, Santos is hiding in the back seat of Angie's small Toyota, and he grabs her and forces her to drive back to the sugar mill. Why doesn't she see him when she gets into the car? It isn't that big!

When del Vecchi realizes Five-O is hot on his trail, he decides instead of sending the bullion in pineapple cans via freighter, to send it by air instead. A look at one of the labels shows that it is going to D.V. (as in del Vecchi) Enterprises, Via del Parajes, Los Quinteros, Paraguay. Considering how secretive this guy is, why would he give a major clue to the cases' destination like this? Kimo in fact grabs one of these labels secretly under his clipboard and takes it back to the office. Another "DUH" moment.

One has to wonder why Del Vecchi just pays off the local workers who were helping put the gold the in pineapple cans — wouldn't he kill them instead, especially since he ordered his men to wipe out all the bus passengers, who were hardly as big a threat to him?

McGarrett and Kimo soon arrive at the sugar mill, and McGarrett — not taking any risks — tells Kimo to grab one of the cases in the pineapple warehouse so he can examine one of the cans by opening it with a can opener which Kimo just happens to have on him. Then he tells Kimo to rescue the kidnapped Angie from the grasp of Santos. (When Angie bites Santos, trying to escape, he belts her in the face.) Interestingly, Kimo gives instructions to McGarrett using Santos' walkie-talkie, which Del Vecchi surely could hear. When Del Vecchi falls off the balcony near the end, freaking out because McGarrett is driving away with his booty, Kimo says "he's dead" almost immediately.

Horrible, horrible banalities at the end, with McGarrett reciting a poem which goes on for almost a minute. He starts by saying "When I was a boy, my father used to give us a penny a line to learn poetry." (This actually happened in Jack Lord's real life, according to one article I read.)

    Gold, gold, gold, gold
    Bright and yellow, hard and cold
    Molten, graven, hammered and rolled
    Heavy to get, light to hold
    Hoarded, bartered, bought and sold
    Stolen, borrowed, squandered, doled
    Spurned by the young, hugged by the old
    The price of many a crime untold
    Judges and senates have been bought for gold
    Esteem and love were never to be sold
    What is fame? An empty bubble
    What is gold but shining trouble?

Terrible! Kimo and Angie walking beside McGarrett are at a loss for words. (Click here for further anal-ysis of the poem.)

The acting by Kimo and Truck in this episode is zombie-like. The end is near...

WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN?

It is obviously a reference to the phrase "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush," a proverb which dates back to the ancient Greeks and means "What one already has is better than what one might possibly get." Don't ask me to explain the significance of this in relation to the show!

CASUALTY LIST:

    Death (x2): Marty and Julie Mae Watts hit in the back of the head before their car plunges into Koa Canyon.
    Death: Tour bus driver's neck is broken before he falls down steps in Shriner’s Hall.
    Death: Johnny Salomao is drowned; Santos is involved.
    Injury: Angie bites Santos, trying to escape. He slaps her.
    Injury: Kimo tackles Santos and subdues him.
    Death: Anthony Del Vecchi falls from railing; Kimo tells McGarrett that he is dead.

MORE TRIVIA:

  • Five-O (or anything other than the bird watchers) doesn't appear until 13:13 into the show.
  • The tour bus advertises "Beaches - Volcanoes - Birds" on its side. Why volcanoes is included is peculiar, since all the ones on Oahu are extinct.
  • Angie's gasps as she and McGarrett discover that the film of the pictures she took of the sugar mill have been exposed are too much. She suddenly realizes that she had a 110 film camera that was not in her bag (the supposedly thorough guys from del Vecchi who broke into her apartment conveniently overlooked this). It has some pictures of the mill on it. Despite the fact that 110 film quality is nowhere near as sharp as that of 35mm film, bogus "electronic enhancement" techniques by the HPD photo lab (which McGarrett says is "the fastest" place to get the film developed) are used to get a closeup of del Vecchi from one of the 110 film camera's photographs. I actually laughed out loud when I saw the results of this, which are crystal clear. Karen Rhodes points out in her book Booking Five-O that when Angie is taking the shots of the mill, we never see the 110 film camera, only the 35mm one.
  • Among the photos hanging on Angie's wall in her apartment is one showing a scene from S05E06, Fools Die Twice. This is how she "flashes" (no pun intended) to call McGarrett. In that earlier episode, however, I don't recall seeing her in the midst of the extremely violent outbreak of gunfire. (Thanks to Rama.)
  • The writing for most of the show is unbelievably bad. As well, the score is supposedly by "Don Ray," like the other 3 Ray episodes this season (not "Don B. Ray," this is suspicious!), but it really doesn't sound like him at all — it is pretty crappy. There are cues from earlier episodes at approximately 22:50 and 39:08 of the DVD, and there is a very brief reference to the Five-O theme at around 49:04.
  • Check the top-heavy female fan who got an autograph from Marty near the beginning of the show after the bus came back to Honolulu. As well, the tan line on Salomao's girl friend suggests an ill-fitting costume.
  • In addition to a poster on a wall for Marty's Wednesday evening Maluhia Park concert, there is another poster advertising a drama by Steven Weyman at the City Theatre called "Honor's Stain."
  • McGarrett wears a leisure suit. He estimates that each one of the three gold rings rings being put into the pineapple cans weighs 2 ounces, for a total of 6 ounces per can. McGarrett figures (don't ask me how) that the total amount of gold is equivalent to the $100 million that Del Vecchi bilked from investors. This would convert into 10,416 pounds of gold, or approximately 5.2 tons, which would require about 27,777 cans. That is a lot of cans. At the rate of 24 cans of pineapple to a case, this means that they would have needed 1,157 cases of pineapple to smuggle the gold, which is probably a lot more than are seen on the back of the pickup truck that is taking the cases to the airport. The name of the company the pineapple is supposedly coming from is Castle & Cooke, Inc., Honolulu.

GALLERY:

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277. (S12E18) The Moroville Covenant BOMB – NO STARS!

Original air date: 3/29/80-- Opening CreditsEnd Credits
Director: Robert L. Morrison; Producer: Andrew Gottlieb (Hollywood); Writer: Seeleg Lester; Music: James Di Pasquale.
Timings: Teaser: 0:32; Main Titles: 0:58; Act One: 12:21; Act Two: 15:45; Act Three: 7:12; Act Four: 12:23; End Credits: 0:39; Total Time: 49:50.

QUICK PLOT:

A political candidate's promising bid for the U.S. Senate is endangered by the murder of a man who tried to blackmail him.

Click here to read Full Plot.

REVIEW:

This episode is awful. A look at the show's position in Season 12 would make one suspect this is because it is almost the last episode in a season which many fans of the show would like to completely ignore or forget. However, this was actually the second episode in production order, after "Who Says Cops Don't Cry," which introduced Sharon Farrell as the new member of the Five-O team, Lori Wilson.

The season opener, "A Lion in the Streets," was fourth in production order after "Labyrinth" (later S12E11), which was the third. Both of these two episodes starred William Smith, who was also in "Moroville." Smith had a featured part in "Lion," which ended with him being invited to join the Five-O team.

However, one shouldn't get too stressed out over the production order, because things can be drastically changed around, just like "Moroville," while the second in production order, was the second last in broadcast order, to make it appear as if Sharon Farrell — who was not in the second half of the season at all — was still a member of the cast near the end.

Both Farrell and Smith are bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in both "Moroville" and "Labyrinth," though the latter contains an incredibly stupid remark by Smith's character. Both of them are seen cracking smiles and even sharing jokes, making it pretty obvious this was before disenchantment set in, resulting in Farrell either quitting or getting fired and Smith being indifferent to the proceedings and acting at times like he would like to punch McGarrett out.

The show begins with McGarrett talking to lawyer David Lawrence (Paul Burke), who is an up-and-coming senatorial candidate. It sounds like they are old pals, and McGarrett wants Lawrence to address the upcoming police graduation luncheon. I immediately thought, "Why is McGarrett arranging this? Isn't this a job for the Honolulu police chief?"

Since Lawrence's car is being repaired, McGarrett gives him a ride home. Lori is waiting by McGarrett's car and tells Lawrence, "I was just standing here, quietly trying to figure out what your majority is going to be." They are tailed to Lawrence's place by Jack Smith (Christerpher Neddels, a.k.a. Rod Aiu), whom we saw walking in front of McGarrett and Lawrence when the two of them came out of Lawrence's office building a few minutes before this. McGarrett, who is aware of the tail, tries to approach Smith after they reach Lawrence's place, but Smith speeds away, almost running over McGarrett.

The next scene is at The Mauna Loa Academy on Heather Drive in Wahiawa the next day. Lawrence told McGarrett and Lori he goes horseback riding there frequently and invited them to join him. Lori hears about an accident at this place on the radio, where "a man and horse ... plunged down the steep mountainside this morning to their deaths" and she goes to investigate. According to HPD's Lieutenant Akana (Danny Kamekona) who is at the scene, the man had "no wallet, no cards, no papers," but gave the name of "Jack Smith" when he went to the stables to sign up for a mount.

Soon after this, Lori has lunch with Lawrence, curious to know if he was out riding when the accident happened. He tells her that not only was he riding, but he witnessed the whole thing. Smith suddenly approached him, also riding, with his horse going very fast before they plunged over a nearby cliff. Lawrence says "I might have been responsible for his death," because Smith's horse "looked out of control," yet he did nothing to stop them. Lawrence suddenly has an outburst of self-doubt, saying, "If I hadn't hesitated, just that second or two... I wouldn't have hesitated a millionth of a second if it were Margot [his wife]. Why didn't I react with my instinct then? Or, as I sat there frozen, did I believe it could be dangerous if I did reach him? If I did try to pull up that crazy horse I could have gone over the cliff with him. Was I afraid? Is that what held me back, Lori?"

Investigation by Five-O reveals that Smith came in on a flight from San Francisco the previous afternoon and rented a car at the airport, paying in cash. In his room at the Royal Palm Motel, a round trip bus ticket from Moroville, Idaho to San Francisco is discovered, from where Smith took a plane to Hawaii. Both Lori and McGarrett recognize Smith as the man who was tailing them the day before, though after Smith almost killed McGarrett, Lori was asked if she saw him and she said "No." It is very odd that considering the limited time Smith had spent on the island, he knew Lawrence’s daily routine to the extent that he hired a horse at the riding academy where Lawrence rode every day, and later was killed in the bizarre accident with all his ID missing.

HPD’s Akane shows up at the motel and brings the Five-O team up to date. According to the coroner’s report, Smith was murdered: “The deceased was full of chloral hydrate, and the horse was feeling no pain, [its bloodstream] loaded with a powerful amphetamine.” In addition to this, “what spooked the horse was a deep jab in his rump with a sharp instrument that pierced his hide.”

The plot thickens when Lori goes to Lawrence's office to inquire what "little town in Idaho" he is from, since McGarrett mentioned this fact to her earlier. It is Moroville, the same "little town" that Smith called home. Lawrence tells Lori that after the tailing incident the day before, that evening he got a visit from Smith, who is the husband of Lawrence's old girl friend Eva Pritchard (Diane McBain). Smith wants $100,000 from Lawrence, or he will expose a big scandal from their hometown dating back many years.

In a flashback to the previous evening, Smith tells Lawrence, "For a hundred big ones, I go back to the mountains, and Eva and you go on to Washington." This seems kind of weird, since the very edgy Smith has seen Lawrence's wife Margot (Helen Funai). Why would he mention Eva as if she is Lawrence's wife? Lawrence tells Smith to get lost. Back in the present, Lori is very persistent in her questions, but Lawrence will not discuss what happened. He contacted various people connected with his senatorial campaign, offering to quit, but they all said it was "too late" for him to do this.

Lori reports back to McGarrett, saying that the District Attorney will give them 24 hours before he charges Lawrence with "withholding evidence" and being "uncooperative," though I don't know if the latter is a real charge. But how does the District Attorney know about Lawrence's connection to Smith in the first place? Did Lori go and blab to him about all this?

Kimo is sent to go to the fictional burg of Moroville in Idaho where he quickly checks out city records and the archives of the local newspaper. You would expect that Moroville does not have an international airport, so how could Carew accomplish this investigation in only one day? Nevertheless, the resourceful Carew uncovers the secret from Lawrence's past — not a particular shady secret by today's standards — which threatens to torpedo his career.

It turns out that when he was younger, Lawrence accidentally mowed down his 67-year-old rich aunt with a car during a snowstorm. The aunt was dead set against spending money on a legal education for her nephew at Stanford — a "pay school" — but her death in the accident overcame that problem. Lawrence's girl friend at the time, Eva, who later married Smith, took the blame for driving the car, something which has been covered up ever since.

Carew gets a lead on Eva, but it turns out she is in Hawaii, ringing Lawrence's front door bell and wanting to speak to him. His wife Margot seems kind of stunned. Lori just happens to be visiting the couple, and she pulls Margot away from the scene into the kitchen.

In the living room, Eva and Lawrence talk to each other in a dopey way, while in the kitchen over a cup of coffee, Margot explains to Lori that she knows everything that happened. Eva says that her husband found a letter from Lawrence which revealed things from the past, and "He made me tell him the truth. He said a man in your position should have to pay for what he's done. He said even if it was an accident, it was breaking the law, letting the lie stand. When I found out, too late, he was on his way here to undo it, I came after him to talk him out of it, to stop him."

Five-O investigates certain local acquaintances of Lawrence, all of whom are connected with his election campaign, and all of whom had something to gain if they knocked off the "extortionist" Smith. All of them also came to Lawrence's place after Smith's blackmail threat.

  • Phil McCorkendale (Carleton Smith), Lawrence's campaign's "labor man," has his union solidly behind Lawrence's candidacy. There is something fishy about the way McCorkendale handled his union's pension fund, but he insists he is backing Lawrence because he will get to the bottom of this and that irregularities originated at the union's national headquarters in Philadelphia. McCorkendale is not pleased at the way Duke drops hints about something untoward regarding his connection to Lawrence.
  • George Sulieman (John Stalker), is a "financial man" and fundraiser. The Unified Banking Group are "unprincipled competitors" for Sulieman's business, and he is pressing the Justice Department to investigate them in connection with anti-trust violations. Lawrence promises to press those investigations if he is elected.
  • Burton Briggs (Donald Carter), who witnessed Lori's grilling of Lawrence, his legal partner, said of the scandal, "Whatever it was is academic now. Smith's dead ... It's done. Finished."
  • Winnie Winston (Don Pomes), state chairman of the political party Lawrence is running for. If Lawrence wins the election, Winston is rumored to have the inside shot at the national chairmanship of the party.

Of all these people, Winston had the most contact with Eva, trying to get her out of town as soon as possible. Although with Winston's assistance she had checked out of her hotel in preparation to go to the airport, she promptly disappeared, and Winston was busted by the cops. At HPD headquarters, Winston tells McGarrett, "I found out that she had come here to protect David Lawrence, [but] that every minute she stayed on the island, in reality she was a threat to him."

Things start to get seriously out of control at this point. Lori tells McGarrett, "Steve, if we're worried about Eva, then the killer's got to believe she's a threat too." McGarrett, short of brainstorms, questions, "Who would be a threat to Dave Lawrence and his election?" Carew suggests Margot!

McGarrett goes to Lawrence's house and talks to Margot in an evasive way, saying "I didn't really consider the facts and clues connected with Smith's murder, carefully enough before now." He asks who could have poisoned Smith, obviously someone he knew, and how did he get to the riding academy, because "he drove his own car up there and the killer drove it back to the motel."

At this point, Eva suddenly appears in Lawrence's house, seemingly having just walked in the front door, not dressed up as when she visited earlier. She has a gun and she points it at Margot, saying "I must kill her ... She's gonna tell on Davey ... She wants to ruin him ... She wants to tell him everything ... I can't let you destroy him." Obviously she is completely nuts!

With prompting from McGarrett, Eva says that she was the one who killed her husband, because after reading Lawrence's letter back in Moroville, he beat her and "made me tell. I didn't wanna tell. He never really understood about Davey and me ... I couldn't let him hurt my Davey, now could I?" The idea that Eva could poison her husband and the horse is really absurd. Where did she get the poison from ... or the gun for that matter, especially considering airlines checking for firearms was an established procedure by 1980?

Lawrence suddenly shows up, and Eva tells him, "We're going to the dance tonight at the lake. Oh, and I'm so excited." The two of them dance in the living room in front of the stunned McGarrett and Margo. Lawrence glances over at McGarrett with this "what the hell is going on here" look. This final scene is hideous to the point of being embarrassing, and is not helped by the music by James Di Pasquale (his only Five-O score), which is really bad.

Despite its glacial pace which is like the whole cast is on Valium, and being almost totally devoid of any typical Five-O action, the episode would have fared much better with a score which didn't mostly sound like easy listening music and didn't contain a plethora of excruciating silences. The climactic build-ups to the waves are super boring.

The color photography, on the other hand, is exceptionally good (the director is Robert Morrison, former cinematographer on the show), highlighting Sharon Farrell's wardrobe, among other things. There is no indication at the end as to whether Lawrence will fess up to the public over his scandalous past.

The script is by Seeleg Lester, who penned six other episodes of the show, including several turkeys — "The Spirit Is Willie," "The Meighan Conspiracy," "The Case Against Philip Christie," "Deadly Courier," "Frozen Assets" and "Invitation to Murder" — and served as a story consultant for the show's final season. Lester was involved with Perry Mason as a writer, producer and story consultant, and the convoluted script for Moroville seems highly reminiscent of that show with its "surprise" ending out of a wide spectrum of possibilities which are set up. Perhaps the show's 2010 reboot which had its share of crazy plots took some inspiration from this?

WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN?

A "covenant" is a contract, in this case meaning the "arrangement" that Lawrence made with Eva for her to take the fall for the accident.

CASUALTY LIST:

    Death (x2): Jack Smith and the horse he is riding die in "accident," both drugged by Eva, Jack's wife.

MORE TRIVIA:

  • The accident with the aunt took place in 1958, or 21 years before the show, according to a newspaper report that Carew uncovers in Idaho. But Winnie Winston refers to it as being both a "20-year-old indiscretion," and having taken place "24 years ago" when he is grilled by McGarrett. There is a big echo in the room at HPD during this interrogation.
  • There are two jump cuts seen, at around 36:03 and 40:06 on the DVD (McGarrett and Pomes respectively), as if the actors made some mistake while delivering their lines and rather than do a retake, the errors were just snipped out.
  • The car that the Lawrence was driving when he ran over his aunt was an Edsel ... what a sneaky way to mention Ford!
  • Last Five-O appearance of Danny Kamekona, who appears as Lieutenant Akane, plus other members of the Five-O repertoire company: Neddels, Don Pomes, Carleton Smith and John Stalker.
  • Check the closeup of the tire near the beginning ... you can see the WD-40 which one Five-O director said was used to help make the well-known squealing noise.
  • When Smith's body is found, there is a news report from KGMB's mobile unit. While this is a TV station, and the female news reporter (Karen Ahn) seems to be talking to a TV camera, there is no camera seen, and Lori listens to the report on the radio in her car while she is driving.
  • Kimo quote: "That was really a good hunch Steve had about 'Jack Smith' being too obvious to be an alias." DUH! McGarrett quote: "Virtue is the only good and self-control the only means of achieving virtue," the latter a comment from Antisthenes, the ancient Greek founder of cynic philosophy (please!). Both Lori and Duke break up in laughter over this.
  • David was born on June 29th, 1937 to Sarah and Eugene Lawrence. This is about 11 years after actor Burke's real birth date in 1926.
  • Lawrence smokes.
  • According to a sign at its city limits, the population of Moroville is 2,368.

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278. (S12E19) Woe To Wo Fat ★★

Original air date: 4/5/80 — Opening CreditsEnd Credits
Director: Barry Crane; Producer: Andrew Gottlieb (Hollywood), William F. Phillips (Hawaii); Writer: Frank Telford; Music: Morton Stevens
Timings: Teaser: 0:32; Main Titles: 0:58; Act One: 15:20; Act Two: 10:31; Act Three: 11:32; Act Four: 10:23; End Credits: 0:39; Total Time: 49:55.

QUICK PLOT:

To investigate the disappearance of three famous scientists, McGarrett disguises himself as one of their colleagues and finds himself once again dealing with Wo Fat.

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REVIEW:

"Through a dozen adventures which have had no resolution, we come now to the final act of this morality play." So says McGarrett's archenemy Wo Fat, prior to his martial arts confrontation with the Five-O boss at the end of this episode.

Wo seems to have retired from being an active no-goodnik and is no longer working with or for the Chinese government. Instead, having taken up residence on some tropical island, he brings kidnapped scientists via a Lear Jet to do his bidding working on the "ultimate missile deterrent system" which, of course, will not be used for peaceful purposes. As viewed from the air there doesn't seem to be a landing strip on this island, though Wo's residence is actually the Anderson Estate which has appeared in several Five-O episodes over the last 12 years and will be seen soon in Magnum, P.I.

Directed by Barry Crane, who produced over 100 episodes of Mission Impossible and directed 15 episodes of that series, and who had mixed results directing Five-O ("Let Death Do Us Part," "The Sleeper" (both mediocre) and "Labyrinth" (12th season show which is sort of OK)), "Woe to Wo Fat" reduces everything to the level of a comic book, though it doesn't mess with our minds as much as "Deadly Courier" or "Here Today, Gone Tonight," both science-fiction-influenced and illogical shows which I have always found stupid, considering Five-O presented itself as a "realistic" show almost all of the time.

Complete with grey wig and beard, McGarrett has himself disguised as Professor Elton Raintree, to whom he bears an uncanny resemblance. Of course, it is just a coincidence that Raintree is in Hawaii recovering from a minor throat operation at Honolulu General Hospital.

Considered "the world's foremost theoretical physicist" since the death of Albert Einstein, Raintree was obviously on Wo's list to be kidnapped for some time and he is nabbed just like three others who he met eight years before at a symposium and who have already been transported to Wo's island: Dr. Fritz Schumacher (Henry Niedzielski), a German national from the University of Heidelberg and Nobel Prize winner in chemistry; Dr. Sven Lindquist (Terence Knapp), world famous metallurgist, a Swedish national; and Dr. Elizabeth Fielding (Pat Crowley), an American who won the Nobel Prize in physics.

As the scientists are being kidnapped and brought to the airport in a taxi or limousine, they are subject to "compliance ration," some kind of gas which makes them into blissfully dopey cult followers, totally overcoming their "will to resist." This gas, which is also administered to them in their rooms at night after they arrive on the island, deprives them of all rational thought, and they never question where they are or what they are doing.

When McGarrett as himself but still in disguise eventually talks to Fielding, with whom Raintree was previously on "intimate terms" and who felt there was something odd about McGarrett-as-Raintree, she has great difficulty in believing anything McGarrett tells her about Wo's real intention to use the deterrent system that the scientists are working on to generate a light ray capable of burning a city to a crisp.

McGarrett's getup as Raintree and his raspy voice are kind of hard to swallow, though it is obvious that the "evil, power hungry international criminal" Wo thinks something is amiss from the moment Raintree was brought to the island.

McGarrett manages to avoid talking in a geeky manner about the science behind the scientists' "project" when they are all assembled together and manages to wake up the first night he is Wo's guest and shuts the vent in his room that the mind-numbing "compliance" fumes are pouring through.

McGarrett is unmasked after being caught trying to activate a transmitter he has brought with him; he is confined to his room, awaiting "execution at dawn." He manages to escape thanks to help from Fielding who bonks a guard on the head with a vase. Illogically, despite having being dosed with the compliance gas every night, Fielding suddenly knows exactly what is going on: "Well, you were right about everything. I told Lindquist and Schumacher." McGarrett then performs some strenuous stunts, including dropping from a second-floor balcony and engaging in Rambo-like blasting of Wo Fat's lab, despite the fact that a "radiation" sign is plainly visible.

McGarrett is pursued by a mini-army of Wo's guards, who time-consumingly come across a field rather than just up the same road that the scientists use to get to the lab from Wo's house. There is a great explosion from the lab just as Wo's men are beside it, which puts them out of action.

The end of the show is just silly. The final conflict in a forest between McGarrett and Wo, obviously stuntmen when seen from several angles, complete with heavy-handed pronouncements from each, is cartoonish, as is the final "booking" of Wo, complete with a "striped pyjamas" prison outfit which might have been seen in a Depression-era chain gang movie. Wo pulls a file out of his shoe as McGarrett says "aloha" and leaves the room, which is annoyingly "cute" after all these two have been through before.

The show recycles two other actors from this season: Lyle Bettger (lawyer Dave DiMarco in "Labyrinth") and Wayne Ward (Joan Carter's boyfriend Wayne Stan Thomas in "Image of Fear"). The absence of any other Five-O regulars, especially the Governor and Duke, is very disappointing. Kimo Carew and Lori Wilson are also nowhere to be seen, the latter because Sharon Farrell had departed the show long before this.

Morton Stevens provides an outstanding score for this episode, probably the best thing about it. It has echoes of the one he did for "How to Steal a Masterpiece." The Five-O theme doesn't appear except at the very end of the show.

This is a show that you will either like or hate. I didn't dislike it during my 2020 re-viewing, just like the time I viewed it after the twelfth season DVDs came out in 2012, probably because the quality of the print on the DVDs is so much better than the wretched TV print that I had to endure when I first watched the show over 25 years before.

CASUALTY LIST:

    Injury: Dr. Elizabeth Fielding gassed in taxi and kidnapped by Ho Lee (Lloyd Kino).
    Injury: McGarrett/Dr. Elton Raintree gassed in limousine and kidnapped by Ho.
    Injury: Ho is knocked out by McGarrett.
    Injury: Guard hit over the head with flower pot and knocked out by Fielding.
    Injury: Laboratory guard disabled by McGarrett.
    Injury (x7): Ho and six guards disabled when laboratory explodes.
    Injury (x2): McGarrett and Wo Fat punch, kick and beat each other in final fight; Wo is finally defeated by McGarrett.

MORE TRIVIA:

  • The final cast credit is Jack Lord as Prof. Raintree. DUH!
  • There actually were a "dozen" confrontations between McGarrett and Wo, though this includes some multi-part episodes, for a total of 12.
  • Although the beginning of the show is supposed to be in Hong Kong, the place where Fielding is staying is the Singapore Plaza Hotel.
  • Wo's "prison number" is 9869.
  • At the end, McGarrett is wearing a jeans outfit. Where did this come from? When Raintree was kidnapped on his way to the airport and after arriving on the island, he was wearing a suit. It's unlikely that Wo would have supplied such a distinguished scholar with jeans.
  • When McGarrett is running away from Wo at the end, he runs past trees where puffs of smoke come out from each side of the tree. This shot looks like it is repeated, but the second time, the puffs of smoke come out opposite sides of the trees.
  • Walter Omori, the "mysterious actor" from numerous earlier episodes, is seen briefly in his final Five-O appearance, uncredited, as Wo's communication officer. Reggie Ho appears at the beginning as a taxi driver in Singapore, speaking some gibberish which starts out sounding like Japanese when Fielding, his potential fare, is picked up by Wo's henchman Ho Lee.
  • When Raintree is gassed in the car, the window behind Ho Lee is opened only a few seconds later to talk to him. Surely the gas would still be in the back seat area!
  • When McGarrett is thinking about his dilemma after being uncovered by Wo, he snaps his fingers four times.
  • The director of this episode, Barry Crane, was murdered in a suburb of Los Angeles on July 5, 1985. On May 9, 2019, a man was arrested in North Carolina for the murder, based on a DNA match, and confessed to the killing.

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