Hawaii Five-O (1968-80) — Season 4 Episode Reviews

INCLUDING ODDITIES, GOOFS AND TRIVIA

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


JUMP TO ANOTHER SEASON:

CLASSIC FIVE-O (1968-1980):
|
Pilot Movie (Episode "0") | 1st Season (Episodes 1-23) | 2nd Season (Episodes 24-48) | 3rd Season (Episodes 49-72) | 5th Season (Episodes 97-120) | 6th Season (Episodes 121-144) | 7th Season (Episodes 145-168) | 8th Season (Episodes 169-191) | 9th Season (Episodes 192-214) | 10th Season (Episodes 215-238) | 11th Season (Episodes 239-259) | 12th Season (Episodes 260-278) | 13th Season |

NEW FIVE-0 (2010-2020):
| 1st Season | 2nd Season | 3rd Season | 4th Season | 5th Season | 6th Season | 7th Season | 8th Season | 9th Season | 10th Season | "Next" Season |

RETURN TO THE SITE'S MAIN PAGECOMPREHENSIVE INDEX


SEASON FOUR (1971-1972) - 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).

S04E01 (73) - Highest Castle, Deepest Grave (Herbert Lom, Jeff Corey, France Nuyen)
S04E02 (74) - No Bottles ... No Cans ... No People (Henry Darrow, Ron Feinberg, Jack Kosslyn, Beth Brickell)
S04E03 (75) - Wednesday, Ladies Free (Monte Markham, Soon-Taik Oh, Marie Windsor, Sheilah Wells)
S04E04 (76) - 3,000 Crooked Miles To Honolulu (Buddy Ebsen, David Canary)
S04E05 (77) - Two Doves And Mr. Heron (Vic Morrow, John Ritter, Dianne Hull)
S04E06 (78) - ... And I Want Some Candy And A Gun That Shoots (Michael Burns, Annette O'Toole, Jeanne Cooper)
S04E07 (79) - Air Cargo — Dial For Murder (Don Chastain, Marion Ross, Michael Strong, Barney Phillips, James Hong)
S04E08 (80) - For A Million ... Why Not? (Robert Fields, Sam Melville, Jack Kruschen, Leigh Christian)
S04E09 (81) - The Burning Ice (Jackie Cooper, Lou Antonio, Loretta Leversee)
S04E10 (82) - Rest In Peace, Somebody (Norm Alden)
S04E11 (83) - A Matter of Mutual Concern (David Opatoshu, Manu Tupou)
S04E12 (84) - Nine, Ten — You're Dead (Moses Gunn, Albert Paulsen)
S04E13 (85) - Is This Any Way To Run A Paradise? (Nephi Hannemann)
S04E14 (86) - Odd Man In (Hume Cronyn, Jiro Tamiya)
S04E15 (87) - Bait Once, Bait Twice (James Olson, Loretta Swit, Malachi Throne)
S04E16 & S04E17 (88 & 89) - The Ninety-Second War, Parts I and II (Dana Wynter, Khigh Dhiegh, Donald Pleasance, Tim O'Connor, Roger C. Carmel)
S04E18 (90) - Skinhead (Lee Paul, Murray MacLeod, Miko Mayama)
S04E19 (91) - While You're At It, Bring In The Moon (Barry Sullivan, Ed Flanders, H.M. Winant, Milton Selzer)
S04E20 (92) - Cloth Of Gold (Jason Evers, Ray Danton, Jay Robinson)
S04E21 (93) - Good Night, Baby — Time To Die! (Beth Brickell, William Watson)
S04E22 (94) - Didn't We Meet At A Murder? (Joanna Barnes, Simon Oakland)
S04E23 (95) - Follow The White Brick Road (Mark Jenkins, David Birney, David Doyle)
S04E24 (96) - R&R&R (Alan Vint, Richard LePore, James Davidson)

Previous Season (Three) • Next Season (Five) • COMPREHENSIVE INDEXSeason IndexSite's Main Page


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.


73. (S04E01) “Highest Castle, Deepest Grave” ★★★★

Original air date: 9/14/71 — Opening CreditsEnd Credits
Director: Charles Dubin; Producer: William Finnegan; Writers: Jerome Coopersmith (teleplay), Elick Moll & Joseph Than (story); Music: Morton Stevens
Timings: Teaser: 3:03; Main Titles: 0:58; Act One: 12:11; Act Two: 11:35; Act Three: 7:47; Act Four: 14:33; End Credits: 0:34; Total Time: 50:41.

QUICK PLOT:

A ten-year-old missing persons case is reopened, uncovering family secrets, when an anthropological dig reveals the bodies of a man and a woman.

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

REVIEW:

As Karen Rhodes suggests in her book about Five-O, there are more than a few similarities between this show and the classic film noir Laura, where Dana Andrews plays a cop who becomes obsessed by the portrait of a woman.

Among them is the score by Morton Stevens, which has a lyrical theme connected with the alluring full-size painting of philanthropic industrialist Mondrago's deceased wife. This theme appears in various guises, much like David Raksin's classic tune that weaves its way through the Otto Preminger movie from 1945.

Herbert Lom plays industrialist and rich guy Mondrago, a man who doesn't like to be pushed around and admires McGarrett for standing up to him. McGarrett goes to visit Mondrago after bones from Anton Parker, Mondrago's "top man," who disappeared 10 years before, are found in a cave by some anthropology students along with the skeleton of a woman.

McGarrett is attracted to Mondrago's daughter Sirone, played by the gorgeous France Nuyen. There is a large painting of a woman in the entrance hallway to Mondrago's place which resembles both Sirone and her mother.

McGarrett becomes suspicious that the woman's body in the cave was that of Mondrago's wife, who supposedly died of an aneurysm, but before she passed away seemed to be having an affair with Parker. When the body of the wife is exhumed from a grave on Mondrago's property, it shows signs of a fractured arm, which does not correspond to the wife's body, which was fracture-free, like the bones of the woman in the cave.

McGarrett and Chin Ho go to visit Dr. Herbert Ventnor (Bill Edwards, later Jonathan Kaye), who was treating the wife prior to her death. Ventnor slips away from the two and, grabbing some medical records, attempts to flee, ending up burned alive along with the records when he drives his car over a cliff and it explodes.

McGarrett also goes to visit Andrew Duncan, the artist who made the life-size portrait of Mondrago's wife in 1951. The eccentric Duncan, who says "I live in squalor," tells McGarrett that Mrs. Mondrago "cast her spell on everyone" and that if he wants to "tarnish her name," he should "get lost." McGarrett brings up the issue of the affair with Parker, and Duncan says, "She wasn't one of your country-club broads with a cocktail in one hand and a motel key in another. She was something different." McGarrett goes away after Duncan tells him to "leave things alone," yelling "Spoiler … defamer … centurion!" at McGarrett as he is on his way out.

Later, Mondrago pays Duncan a large sum of money ($50,000) to keep his mouth shut, since he was a witness to events surrounding the wife's death and gets his servant Akea (Wilfred "Moe" Keale, in his first role on the show) to blow up Duncan's place to make it look like the artist was killed.

This explosion is the show's only major failing. When McGarrett leaves Duncan's, it's about a minute and 10 seconds before the place is consumed by fire. Considering he would be at least half a mile away if he was driving at 30 miles an hour (probably not this slow), it's unlikely that McGarrett would hear the explosion, which seems to be very loud. This would be more convincing if McGarrett had seen a column of smoke rising from the house, rather than the point of view of the burning house on the beach.

Mondrago eventually comes to the Five-O office and confesses that yes, he was the one who killed his wife and Parker when he discovered their affair and got Akea to take the bodies to the cave. He then substituted another woman's body for that of his wife to be buried in the coffin; this woman had been brought by Mondrago with others to Honolulu after a tidal wave on Molokai and had died at Ventnor's clinic. Despite what Mondrago says, McGarrett feels that "Something's wrong," specifically the fact that when surprised by Mondrago, Parker didn't run out of the house, but seemingly just stuck around to get shot after Mondrago went to his study to get his gun.

Returning to Mondrago's place, McGarrett has to contend with Akea who tries to keep him from entering, but is dispatched with a karate chop. Inside, McGarrett encounters Sirone coming down the stairway with a gun. She is upset because she thinks McGarrett made her father take the fall for her mother's death, whereas the young Sirone was the one who actually killed both Parker and her mother. She shoots and wounds McGarrett, then tells him "I killed my mother," describing her as "dirty."

These events have all been hushed up by her father for the last 10 years, and Sirone has been receiving psychiatric care which was also hidden from public view. (We have had a glimpse of some signs of her mental instability in a scene between Sirone and her father earlier.) Mondrago is freed, since his crime was only "one of concealment," which McGarrett feels "the courts will understand." Mondrago tells McGarrett, "I hope you'll forgive me if I don't say thanks."

Overall, despite the one flaw mentioned above, this is an outstanding episode with an especially good script and powerhouse acting by Herbert Lom, France Nuyen and Jeff Corey as well as Jack Lord. And there is Morton Stevens' score — what a genius the man was!

WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN?

"Highest castle" suggests how successful and rich Mondrago is, but "deepest grave," on the other hand, suggests how secrets from his family's past have been buried (the bodies in the cave and the "replacement" body for his wife's in her coffin on his property), out of sight, out of mind.

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.

MORE TRIVIA:

MUSIC:

Score by Morton Stevens.

The two times at the beginning of each line in the list below are when the cue appears in the show and the length of the cue. Click the arrow in the player to hear a suite containing these cues. To finish before the end, click the stop (‖‖) button. The number in red is the approximate time you will hear the cue in the suite.

#1, 00:00, 00:08, 00:00, Opening wave.
#2, 01:50, 00:37, 00:08, Anthropology students find bones, professor talks to McGarrett.
#3, 02:59, 01:00, 00:45, Music leads into main titles (new arrangement).
#4, 04:02, 02:27, 01:45, McGarrett drives to Mondrago's, he sees the painting.
#5, 10:12, 00:14, 04:13, McGarrett returns to office; Danno brings him up to date on the case.
#6, 12:59, 03:12, 04:26, Dr. Ventnor flees, McGarrett orders an all-point bulletin from Dispatch.
#7, 16:55, 00:35, 07:38, McGarrett returns to Mondrago's with more questions.
#8, 18:34, 00:39, 08:13, As he is about to leave, Sirone wants to talk to McGarrett.
#9, 19:40, 01:50, 08:52, McGarrett goes to Duncan's place.
#10, 25:44, 02:03, 10:42, McGarrett leaves Duncan's; Akea shows up to make Duncan "disappear."
#11, 27:49, 00:11, 12:45, The hearing for an exhumation order for Mondrago's wife's body is held.
#12, 35:21, 00:11, 14:37, The order is granted; the exhumation takes place.
#13, 31:10, 00:36, 13:34, McGarrett has a flashback to when Sirone's mother and Parker were shot.
#14, 34:21, 00:26, 14:10, Sirone freaks out; her father comforts her.
#15, 35:21, 00:11, 14:37, McGarrett orders Mondrago's arrest.
#16, 35:24, 00:09, 14:48, Details of the woman whose body was substituted for Mondrago's wife are discussed.
#17, 39:27, 00:31, 14:57, McGarrett flies to the Big Island where Duncan has been located.
#18, 42:27, 01:09, 15:28, McGarrett talks to Danno about the portrait; he returns to Mondrago's.
#19, 44:30, 03:46, 16:38, McGarrett encounters Sirone, who wounds him and shoots the picture of her mother.
#20, 49:22, 00:43, 20:23, Mondrago is released from jail.

GALLERY:

Click on images below to see them large size. Use the back button in your browser to return to this page.

OR...

Click here for a slide show of all the large images.

Return to Quick Index


74. (S04E02) “No Bottles...No Cans...No People” ★★★  BOOK HIM, DANNO 

Original air date: 9/21/71 — Opening CreditsEnd Credits
Director: Michael O'Herlihy; Producer: William Finnegan; Writers: Jerry Ludwig & Eric Bercovici; Music: Morton Stevens
Timings: Teaser: 4:18; Main Titles: 0:58; Act One: 13:24; Act Two: 11:06; Act Three: 9:40; Act Four: 10:38; End Credits: 0:33; Total Time: 50:37.

QUICK PLOT:

A local hoodlum tries to eliminate the competition and open the way for a mainland crime syndicate to operate in Hawaii.

Click here to read Full Plot.

REVIEW:

Henry Darrow is the smirking gangster Johnny Oporta, who wants to become the Mob's man in Hawaii, in charge of various rackets like prostitution, gambling, narcotics, loan sharking and protection.

As the show begins, Oporta, ostensibly the director of a local public relations company, is escorting a "negotiator" from the mainland named Larry (Jack Kosslyn) to the airport, assuring him that in six days or less everything will be "sewed up nice and tight." It sounds like Oporta has tried and failed to pull this off before. Larry tells him, "You must forgive our impatience, but when there are millions at stake, there's no margin for error," suggesting this is Johnny's last chance.

Oporta's way of dealing with those who would interfere with his plans is to have them knocked off by his two thugs Ray (Al Harrington) and Ozzie (Charles Bent), and then have their bodies burned in the incinerator at the local waste treatment facility. At this location, Furtado (Ron Feinberg) is in charge of processing the trash from dumpsters where these two goons disposed of the bodies.

Two pimps, one named Phil Hurley (Derek Mau, uncredited) and the other Peter Yano (Danny Kaleikini), both get this treatment. In fact, the dumpsters containing their bodies are taken on different days from the same alley and dumped into a garbage truck with exactly the same garbage and the same traffic driving on the street behind!

The situation with Oporta is potentially so serious that McGarrett gets a visit from a Fed, Assistant U.S. Attorney General David Benson (Tom Palmer), who warns him that an investigation reveals the mob feels the time is ripe for Hawaii, "the crossroads of the Pacific, the Waikiki District in particular … a hundred square blocks [where] every year, a million and a half tourists stream in and out." Benson knows that Oporta has a deadline to meet, but McGarrett is also familiar with Oporta, who he goes to visit.

Oporta's office is in the Queen Emma Building. Busting his way into the inner office in his usual manner, bypassing the receptionist, McGarrett tells Oporta that "from now on, I'm squeezing you so hard that it's all gonna crack open. And when it does, you won't have anything or anybody to peddle." As McGarrett leaves, Oporta sarcastically tells him to "stop by any time."

After Yano is murdered, his girl friend Sally Hodges (Beth Brickell), who was also the number one girl in his "stable" and knows how Oporta threatened Yano, gets in touch with McGarrett. He tells her that he can't bust Oporta without hard evidence. She starts yelling at him things like "You're acting like it's a big mystery [that] Peter's dead and we both know Johnny Oporta's the reason why."

Sally takes matters into her own hands, first sending a letter to McGarrett, care of his office at the Iolani Palace. In this letter, she writes, "I've got a gun and I'm going to see Johnny Oporta. Everybody knows the truth about what happened to Peter, but nobody will do anything about it, so I'm going to. If I don't come back, this will tell you where to look."

Sally confronts Oporta with a gun in his parking garage, but the sweet-talking Oporta manages to disarm her and she gets shot dead. Later when McGarrett shows her letter to Oporta, his reply is "A crank letter doesn't prove anything, not by itself."

Realizing he has a problem over and above his usual routine in getting rid of Sally's body, Oporta contacts Furtado, offering him $7,500 to take care of things. Furtado is reluctant to do this because of the risk he took arranging it so Yano's body would only be partially burned so that others in the local criminal community would have fear stricken into their hearts. Furtado finally relents when Oporta promises him this will really be the last time he uses Furtado's services.

Although Sally's body is incinerated, Five-O gets a break when Che Fong recovers a surgical pin made of solid steel implanted after her left forearm was fractured in an automobile accident three years before. This was found in a bucket of items that the incinerator could not destroy, combed from the ashes by Spooner ("Lippy" Espinda), one of the people at the garbage plant who rakes through the rubbish trying to recover things that the employees can sell for scrap metal. McGarrett calls this pin his corpus delicti.

In addition, Furtado's house is raided by members of the Five-O team to see if they can dig up anything, even though none of the plant's employees have any unusual activity in their bank accounts. Danno finds $27,500 hidden under the back seat of an old car that Furtado is restoring in his garage.

When McGarrett goes to Furtado's work place, there is a fight between the two of them. Charlie, one of the other employees, tries to intervene and instead falls into the flaming incinerator pit. (Maybe he was also on the take, because it seems to be me that if there was a body in the garbage dumped into the incinerator, it would be difficult to guarantee that it would be completely hidden.)

Furtado is busted, as is Oporta along with his two thugs when he meets the returning negotiator Larry at the airport, finally thinking he is going to be crowned king of the local rackets.

This show is well-directed by Michael O'Herlihy and has an above-average script and interesting photography like the use of a wide-angle lens in the limousine at the beginning as well as other scenes. Henry Darrow as Oporta with his smug attitude thinks he is getting under McGarrett's skin, but the top cop meets the challenge. (Darrow seems to be channeling Kirk Douglas for much of the episode.) The score by Stevens is very good, including the sound of a bonging bell, not the usual one which changes pitch when it is lowered into water. The bell is combined with a creepy synthesizer-like sound when garbage is being dumped into a truck or placed into the furnace at the plant by Furtado.

The beginning of the show is kind of confusing, however, because the Cadillac limo containing Oporta and Larry is seen driving behind the iconic tower at the Honolulu airport as if it were leaving the place. This is followed by the two men in one of the Wiki-Wiki buses used to transport people at the airport between terminals. They seem to be sitting in the back seat of the first of two buses which are the same but are coupled together, sort of like two diesel engines on a train. To those of us unfamiliar with how transportation at the airport works, there could probably be some better editing in this scene or an explanation.

EPISODE PROMO:

Click here to see the promo. Use the back key in your browser to return to this screen.

CASUALTY LIST:

MORE TRIVIA:

GALLERY:

Click on images below to see them large size. Use the back button in your browser to return to this page.

OR...

Click here for a slide show of all the large images.

Return to Quick Index


75. (S04E03) “Wednesday, Ladies Free” ★★★  BOOK HIM 

Original air date: 9/28/71 — Opening CreditsEnd Credits
Director: Michael O'Herlihy; Producer: William Finnegan; Writers: Paul Playdon & Jerome Coopersmith (teleplay), Paul Playdon (story); Music: Richard Shores
Timings: Teaser: 4:03; Main Titles: 0:58; Act One: 9:53; Act Two: 14:03; Act Three: 9:48; Act Four: 11:23; End Credits: 0:34; Total Time: 50:42.

QUICK PLOT:

A detective with an interest in a case where a strangler murders women, leaving them wearing a wig and garish makeup, keeps interfering with the investigation.

Click here to read Full Plot.

REVIEW:

A psycho is knocking off women by strangling them, then dressing them up like a "painted doll," according to Kono, or "a hooker" according to McGarrett. A blonde wig is placed on their heads, and lipstick and other makeup is applied, including a mole on their right cheeks.

After the latest and fifth victim, a 31-year-old single nurse named Angela Waring, is discovered, Five-O is on the scene and so is a private detective named Jerry Rhodes (Monte Markham), who has an interest in the case, because his wife Mary was the third victim of the psycho.

McGarrett begrudgingly lets Rhodes view the murder scene, even though he suspects that Jerry only wants to follow the killer's trail with the intention of tracking him down and murdering him in revenge because of his wife. Rhodes says he won't do that because is not "not stupid," and "killing him won't bring Mary back."

McGarrett is going up the wall, because he can't figure out who the killer might be. Doctor Holmby (Danny Kamekona) has some ideas: "Perfectionist, consistent, homicidal brilliance. I would say chances are he lives alone. A single man without much use for women." When McGarrett asks, "Homosexual?", the doctor says, "Possibly, but not necessarily. We know he never assaults them. He could be impotent based on any number of things. Possibly an experience of rejection. Could be any woman in his life. Mother, girlfriend, prostitute. Whoever she was, she sent him into a rage that triggered his psychosis. But his attempts at revenge were blocked. Consequently, he takes it out on other women, kills them and remakes their identity."

Rhodes checks out the bar scene, where he encounters a prostitute named Sheila (Marjorie Battles). Why he thinks she can provide him with any information is not obvious, but back at her place, he threatens to expose the fact that she is a junkie unless she helps him track down the woman that the psycho is making all his victims look like. Sheila finally tells him the woman's name is Cathy Fields, formerly Haines.

Chin Ho visits Gloria (film noir and B movie actress Marie Windsor), operator of an escort service, but she doesn't give him any leads. However, Gloria goes to see Cathy to plead with her to talk to the cops, because doing so will save her life and "maybe a lot of others." Danno digs up some dirt on Rhodes' wife from a taxi driver named Tome Yoshiko (Kwan Hi Lim). Turns out that Mary was a swinger who hung out with a guy named Raymond Crenshaw (Eugene McDunnah, uncredited). But when McGarrett goes to talk to Crenshaw, he has an iron-clad alibi for the night of Mary's murder.

McGarrett goes to see Rhodes about his wife's affair with Crenshaw, wanting to know why Rhodes is obsessed with finding her killer, inasmuch as his wife was fooling around with someone else. Rhodes tells him that the two of them had a huge fight, after which they realized that maybe there was hope for their relationhip after all. McGarrett tells Jerry not to expect any more favors because he withheld information, that he is now "off the case."

Working on his own, Rhodes phones Cathy (Sheilah Wells), who left the "business" some time ago, and is living a relatively respectable life as a housewife who is four months pregnant. Rhodes threatens to tell Cathy's husband, army Captain Henry ("Hank") Fields (Norman Dupont) about her past unless she can provide him with her "little black book" which listed her clients. Cathy tells him she no longer has it, she gave it to another hooker named Susan Watkins.

Rhodes finds the book at Watkins' place and calls some of the customers, telling them that "Cathy's back [and] wants to talk ... about old times." One of these men, Vic Tanaka, returns the call and Rhodes, pretending to be Cathy's "manager," sets up an appointment at her place the next day.

After a sixth woman is found murdered, McGarrett dragoons the Five-O team to an all-night brainstorming session to try and crack the case. Using a large map which shows where the victims lived and the knowledge that some of them had connections with a certain part of town and the killer likely had access to their keys, they focus on a car wash. Visiting the place, the manager Frank (Robert Luck) tells them that Tanaka was one of the employees who worked there part-time on Wednesday, when it was free for ladies to get their cars washed.

Five-O doesn't find Tanaka at his house, but they do find equipment to duplicate keys from impressions made in molding compound as well as wigs, mannequin heads and makeup. They also find a piece of paper with Cathy's address written on it, as well as Rhodes' phone number, though you have to wonder why this would be discarded in the garbage can and Tanaka would not have taken it with him.

Tanaka arrives at Cathy's place where she is shocked to see him. She tries to escape and he attacks her. But Rhodes is also there, and shoots Tanaka dead. When Five-O shows up, Rhodes acts like he is a hero because he saved Cathy's life.

But there is a big twist ending. McGarrett tells Rhodes that they know his wife never got her car washed, because she didn't know how to drive and instead "took taxis all over town." When McGarrett accuses Rhodes of killing his wife, suggesting a copycat crime and that their marriage was on the rocks, rather than keep his mouth shut, Rhodes blabs away, incriminating himself! Rhodes thinks he is going to get away with "premeditated manslaughter," for which the penalty is 10 years, but McGarrett has him booked for first degree murder.

This episode is interesting, one of several this season where the writers really seemed to be pushing the envelope as to what they could get away with. The score by Richard Shores is creepy, employing some instrument which sounds like a synthesizer. The production team sort of overdoes atmosphere at the beginning, however. When Tanaka is making up the face of Angela Waring, his first victim in the show, a green light keeps flashing in her room from outside, which is peculiar, considering she lives in an apartment building, not a 1940's type hotel.

WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN?

The common thread in all the murders is that the women all patronized the car wash, where ladies got their car washed for free on Wednesdays and Vic Tanaka took advantage of this to make impressions of their house keys when they turned the keys over to him. There is no mention of whether there was a pattern of the murders being on Wednesdays or shortly thereafter, though.

EPISODE PROMO:

Click here to see the promo. Use the back key in your browser to return to this screen.

CASUALTY LIST:

MORE TRIVIA:

GALLERY:

Click on images below to see them large size. Use the back button in your browser to return to this page.

OR...

Click here for a slide show of all the large images.

Return to Quick Index


76. (S04E04) “3,000 Crooked Miles To Honolulu” ★★

Original air date: 10/5/71 — Opening CreditsEnd Credits
Director: Jerry Thorpe; Producer: William Finnegan; Writer: Jerome Coopersmith; Music: Richard Shores
Timings: Teaser: 4:21; Main Titles: 0:58; Act One: 14:42; Act Two: 8:37; Act Three: 8:42; Act Four: 12:48; End Credits: 0:34; Total Time: 50:42.

QUICK PLOT:

A clever college professor, working in cahoots with the Mob, plots an elaborate scheme to cash $750,000 worth of stolen travelers checks in Hawaii.

Click here to read Full Plot.

REVIEW:

Buddy Ebsen stars as Professor Ambrose Pierce, an academic with a phenomenal memory who "can memorize three decks of cards" and who "developed a system [which] almost broke the bank in Vegas." Because of his talents, he approaches the Mob with an elaborate money-making scheme involving traveler's checks.

At the beginning of the show, two of the mobsters, George (David Canary) and Terry Whitman Doran (Charles Bollig, identified in the credits as "Soldier") steal cheques from a World Wide Traveler's Checks armored truck in Colorado after blowing it up with a bazooka.

The next scene finds Pierce, George, Doran and over 100 people at the San Francisco airport waiting to board a flight to Hawaii. This gang is travelling under the guise of the Faculty Discount Travel Club, with each of the members having assumed the identity of some real-life academic. (It is actually not made clear in the show where this gang came from.) Their mission is to spend the checks in Hawaii for relatively insignificant amounts and return the change to the Mob via Pierce, no doubt making some kind of small commission for themselves — and I'm sure that Pierce will be well paid for his "services."

During the flight to Honolulu, one of the participants named Whitney Davis (Glenn Cannon, uncredited!) starts to act in a very disoriented manner, incoherently babbling details about the check-cashing scam. Despite Pierce's efforts to shut Davis up or pass off his condition as not that serious, Davis is taken to hospital when they land. His symptoms are diagnosed as Ménière's Syndrome, a condition of the inner ear which results in vertigo, perhaps caused by a tumor. But before Davis can be treated, he is shot dead by Doran, pretending to be a lab technician in the hospital, using a gun with a silencer.

It is later discovered that Whitney Davis, age 40 and unmarried, an economics instructor at Pacific Western College, is "away on summer vacation." Based on his fingerprints, the now-dead "Davis" is actually Floyd F.X. O'Neal, alias Foxy Neal, alias Francis Rogers, alias Harpy Wilton, hometown, Chicago, with five arrests and three convictions for embezzlement, bunco and fraud.

After the robbery in Colorado, news reached the Honolulu branch of World Wide Traveler's Checks quickly, and the boss there, Frank Okawa (Tom Fujiwara), asked his secretary Luana Mowalai (Lani Kim) to send out a bulletin to all local merchants with a list of the serial numbers. Before she could do this, however, she was murdered by some goon hired by the Mob as part of the scheme who was hiding in their office. He left a memo for Okawa suggesting that Luana did send out the information.

After Davis's being ID'd as a crook, McGarrett is suspicious that other members of the teachers' tour are crooks, maybe even Pierce himself. He arranges for a local professor, Elias Jordan (Bill Edwards), who knows Pierce, to come to Pierce's hotel room. But Jordan really does know Pierce, so McGarrett is left with egg on his face.

When he finds out that Davis and Luana are both dead, Pierce wants to call off the scheme because they have already collected $517,428, but the menacing George convinces him otherwise. The jig is finally up when Galen Kam, a restaurant cashier, notices that two checks cashed by two seemingly unrelated customers have sequential serial numbers (500046 and 500047). McGarrett, referring to the whole scheme as a "crazy jigsaw puzzle," has a brainstorm and figures out what is going on, complete with flashbacks.

If you think hard about this episode, some things relating to the checks are kind of far-fetched:

Despite the head-scratching issues like the above, the show is not bad, and McGarrett's final words to the planeload of crooks are a classic, concluding with the line "Aloha, suckers." The effect of this is like sitting through an opera with an incomprehensible plot, waiting for that incredible final aria!

WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN?

I'm not sure about this, the flight distance between San Francisco and Honolulu is 2395 miles!

CASUALTY LIST:

MORE TRIVIA

GALLERY:

Click on images below to see them large size. Use the back button in your browser to return to this page.

OR...

Click here for a slide show of all the large images.

Return to Quick Index


77. (S04E05) “Two Doves And Mr. Heron” ★★

Original air date: 10/12/71 — Opening CreditsEnd Credits
Director: Charles Dubin; Producer: William Finnegan; Writer: Anthony Lawrence; Music: Don B. Ray
Timings: Teaser: 4:36; Main Titles: 0:58; Act One: 12:38; Act Two: 8:52; Act Three: 12:10; Act Four: 10:51; End Credits: 0:34; Total Time: 50:39.

QUICK PLOT:

A tourist takes the law into his own hands after being robbed of his wallet with a key to a storage locker containing a stolen $250,000.

Click here to read Full Plot.

REVIEW:

Self-styled "hippie freak" Ryan Moore (John Ritter) makes money begging from people in a Honolulu park by the beach. A white-haired lady that he tries to charm in the opening scene is played, uncredited, by Peggy Oumansky, who also appeared in S03E18/19, "F.O.B. Honolulu."

When Moore spots Edward Heron (Vic Morrow), a typical tourist, "pale white, first time in the sun, cigar tilted at an I've-got-plenty-of-bread angle," he gets his girlfriend Cleo Michaels (Dianne Hull) to approach him, but she is unsuccessful in getting any money, despite saying "you remind me of my father," which Moore figures will make Heron "wanna give [her] some advice as he's shelling out."

The obnoxious Moore then ups the pitch with Heron, who pulls a fiver out of his pocket and says "there's more where this came from." Heron starts touching Moore's face and saying "Why don't you talk for a minute?", suggesting he will pay for a homosexual tryst. At this point, Cleo intervenes, and Moore grabs a two by four from a nearby garbage can and uses it to bonk Heron on the head. As Heron lies on the ground unconscious (no one nearby seeing what is transpiring), Moore steals his wallet, later commenting in a swishy voice, "He deserved it, the closet queen."

In the wallet is a key for a coin locker which Moore tracks down to the airport. It contains an attaché case, and when Moore he takes it back to the candle shop where he lives, he discovers that it contains a lot of money. Realizing he has hit the jackpot, Moore, spouting various hippie clichés about the "plastic establishment" and so forth, wants Cleo to run away with him to Hong Kong and India. Cleo isn't too enthusiastic about this, saying "It isn't right … there's a principle." Moore tells her, "Come on, Cleo, no middle-class morality."

After Heron wakes up in the hospital missing his wallet and not wishing to co-operate with Chin Ho who is asking questions, he leaves the place without paying the bill. Because of his suspicious behavior and thanks to a fingerprint that he left in the hospital room, Heron is soon identified. His name is actually Ernest Hampton and he is wanted by San Francisco police because he embezzled $250,000 from an employee insurance fund for a chain grocery firm.

Heron manages to track down Moore through some guy outside the International Marketplace. When goes inside the candle shop, a woman there named Brenda (Kerry Sherman), who bears a strong resemblance to Cleo, is lying in a heroin-induced stupor. Thinking she is Cleo, Heron slaps her around, just at the moment she dies from an overdose. Freaking out, Heron picks up a lit candle and throws it into a corner. Whether he did this intentionally or just wants to get rid of light in the room is a good question. In any case, this causes the place to burn down. As the flames engulf the candle shop, the irony of a poster on the wall --"Today is the first day of the rest of your life" — is not lost.

When Brenda's charred body is found in the aftermath, this gets Five-O's major attention. Danno is also interested, because he too is looking for Cleo, who has run away to Hawaii. She is the daughter of his former rooming house landlady in Berkeley. Danno has already gotten Dave Capps (Norman Reyes), the HPD officer in charge of runaways, to give finding a Cleo a high priority and dropped off a photo of Cleo at a young people's center run by a priest, identified only as "Father K" (Robert Witthans). Danno is relieved when Doc Bergman assures him that the burned-up girl was not Cleo.

Because "some kids" identified Hampton as leaving the candle shop where he was "looking for a guy with an old top hat [Moore]" and that the kids also said that Moore and Cleo lived there (which causes Danno to perk up), McGarrett has a brainstorm, which he sums up by saying that Moore and Cleo "have something that [Hampton] wants and we know what that could be."

Meanwhile, Hampton continues his quest, inquiring in a hippie bar where "crappy rock music" is playing as to Moore's whereabouts, describing Moore's "costume": "He wears a black top hat and he has … a jacket." The barman says, "Isn't there anything unusual about him?" and offers Hampton some licorice-flavored cigarette papers for "rolling your own." Shortly after, Trinity (Brooks Almy), a woman in the bar who overheard this conversation, tells Hampton that she is a friend of Cleo, who earlier on said that she and Moore were both going to be "leaving Hawaii, probably tonight," and Hampton can probably find both of them at the airport. Trinity later tells Danno the same thing at the church drop-in center.

Unfortunately, from this point to the end, the show gets kind of stupid.

Cleo and Moore arrive at the airport, along with Hampton and Five-O. Cleo is still of a different mind about whether or not to leave the islands, and when Moore goes to get a snack for the trip, Cleo, looking distraught, for some unknown reason takes an elevator up to a higher level in the airport and Hampton follows her. Once she leaves the elevator, Hampton grabs her and has Moore paged, saying if he doesn't get the money back, Cleo will be killed. I don't understand how Hampton can keep her under control if they are still in a public area where there is a phone.

Moore then decides to leave Hawaii without Cleo, but when he tries to get on the plane, he is grabbed by Five-O. How would they know who he is, because he is not wearing his stock costume? McGarrett quickly gets Moore's co-operation, telling him, "You got any money in that bag, baby, you're hung for 20 years, you dig?" Told where Hampton is holding Cleo, McGarrett says, "Chin, contact the chief of airport maintenance. Tell him I want a layout of that whole area." But there is only a 20 minute time frame before Cleo will be dead and the clock is already running!

Moore is supposed to meet Hampton at some "old airport building on the other side of the field" and he now goes there as part of McGarrett's plan. But how did Hampton find this building? Was he surveying the airport on his own earlier? This building seems to be really far away from the terminal, especially if the tower which we can see in the distance is the iconic airport tower.

Hampton launches into a lengthy rant, telling how upset he is that Moore and Cleo interfered with his scheme: "Two years of planning. Fourteen years of work. Do you understand the meaning of the word 'work'? Skimming the insurance fund, frightened every day that they'll catch me. Detesting my job and living with a woman who hated me. Fourteen years. And you want me to throw it away to let you go? … I'm gonna kill you. Both of you … I've never killed anything before. But I've got to do it. I've got to, don't you see? There's too much at stake. No loose ends, no loose ends. It's clean. But if they catch me, they'll put me in prison for the rest of my life."

Without any explanation, McGarrett, Danno and Kono are seen running under the runway in a tunnel to the building where the hostages are being held, only to find that at one point it is completely blocked. A guy from the airport accompanying them explains: "A couple of years ago, we started to demolish this section. We were gonna clear it for a runway, but then the plan was dropped … There's 20, 30 feet of this." This is particularly dumb, and sounds like the show was running a bit short, so they added in this extra material. The three Five-O men rush back in time to the tunnel entrance, wherever that is, and then somehow sneak up on Hampton and his two hostages through the back door of the building. When Hampton, who has a gun, tries to escape, he is wounded by McGarrett.

Cleo is now confronted with the truth about her boyfriend, that he is a total jerk, and Danno is relieved that she has finally been found. The show manages to end without being too syrupy, despite Cleo's quote from Siddhartha Gautama: "If you speak and act with pure thought, happiness follows you like a shadow." Cleo tells Danno that she doesn't want to come home just yet.

The music is credited to Ray, though it contains a lot of familiar cues like the violin and trombone interval themes, the crappy rock music (not the usual tracks) and some weird electronic sounds heard when the Brenda ODs. Ritter plays the part of the obnoxious Moore very well, and the show has some nice photography in the candle shop which has stained-glass walls. Because this is the original Five-O which avoided using process shots, there is a very interesting sequence, filmed with three cameras, where Moore and Cleo are driving in his jeep down a Honolulu street.

WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN?

A dove is often associated with the concept of peace and pacifism (qualities also associated with hippies); the heron, on the other hand, is a bird which, according to Wikipedia, utilizes techniques which could be called sneaky to grab its food, employing feeding behaviours such as foot stirring and probing, flapping its wings and attracting its prey by using bait. I don't know if the people who made up the title for the show intended this kind of symbolism, though.

CASUALTY LIST:

MORE TRIVIA:

GALLERY:

Click on images below to see them large size. Use the back button in your browser to return to this page.

OR...

Click here for a slide show of all the large images.

Return to Quick Index


78. (S04E06) “...And I Want Some Candy And A Gun That Shoots” ★★★

Original air date: 10/26/71 — Opening CreditsEnd Credits
Director: Michael O'Herlihy; Producer: William Finnegan; Writers: Paul Playdon & Jerome Coopersmith (teleplay), Paul Playdon (story); Music: Richard Shores
Timings: Teaser: 6:05; Main Titles: 0:58; Act One: 16:46; Act Two: 5:24; Act Three: 10:10; Act Four: 10:44; End Credits: 0:35; Total Time: 50:42.

QUICK PLOT:

A deranged sniper endangers the lives of motorists as he fires at cars from a hillside bunker overlooking a major highway.

Click here to read Full Plot.

REVIEW:

When this episode aired, I think the concept of mass murders by a random lunatic in the USA was still kind of a novelty, if you can excuse this expression.

In September, 1949, Howard Unruh killed 13 people with a Luger while walking through his neighborhood in New Jersey. In the 1960s, the most famous shooting spree, out of not many, was that of Charles Whitman in Austin, Texas on August 1, 1966. From the University of Texas Tower, Whitman killed from 14 to 17 people, depending on which source you are consulting.

Lists of "mass shootings" suggest there was an incident in 1965 which may have inspired this Five-O show. On April 25 of that year, south of Orcutt, California, a 16-year-old named Michael Andrew Clark opened fire on cars traveling along U.S. Highway 101 using a military rifle and a pistol taken from his father's locked gun safe. Three people were killed and ten were wounded before Clark committed suicide.

At the beginning of this episode, Vietnam vet and ace marksman William T. ("Billy") Shem Jr. (Michael Burns) buys a rifle, for which he gets a deal, according to the clerk in the sporting goods store: "It's like you bought the gun, got the scope and the bullets for free." (He is getting 500 rounds of ammo.) There is some paperwork, "Some federal forms for guns," but this is "some new red tape [which] won't hold up purchase." When Shem asks if ID is needed, the clerk says, "You're over 21? No identification." This conflicts with what is in the paper that Shem then signs which specifically asks for ID like a driver's license. Shem signs the registration papers as "George C. Patton." It is pretty dumb of the clerk not to catch this, though Patton's real middle initial was "S." The well-received movie about Patton starring George C. Scott dates from 1970, the year before this show.

Shem then goes to an bunker on the outside of Diamond Head located above a busy road where he listens to music on a portable radio and proceeds to shoot out the tires of a tall blonde woman's car. When she hails two cops who just happen on the scene, Shem shoots both of them. Beau Van Den Ecker is Ryder, the first victm; he dies instantly. His face is hardly seen and he hasn't uttered a word, but he rates a credit at the end! The position of the woman behind Ryder suggests that she might also be hit by the bullet if it went through him, but she runs away, never to be seen again.

Despite the fact the second cop, Tommy Ewa (Arte McCollough) was wounded and both of them dropped beside the woman's car, after the main titles they are both beside their own car, out of Shem's sight line. The view through Shem's scope often seems typically for Five-O wrong, sometimes looking like it is at, or close to, ground level. So do numerous other angles from his point of view and that of the police throughout the show. A shot looking up at the bunker after the titles makes you wonder how Shem can see anything on the road at all. There is also a lot of foliage in front of the bunker which should make it difficult for him to get a good aim.

Somehow a call about the incident gets back to police headquarters, which promptly brings out what looks like much of HPD as well as Five-O. Herman Wedemeyer appears in police uniform as Duke, but his last name is Kanaha instead of Lukela. McGarrett totally takes charge of the situation. Isn't there a police captain who should be doing this?

A helicopter arrives almost immediately, which Danno uses to spot Shem's car. It is parked down by the ocean on the other side of the road. Danno can get the license number of the car — IB-1113 — even though the helicopter is hovering off to the car's left. A cop named Paul (Nephi Hanneman) who was off duty arrives and offers to go up the hill to get "that psycho," but is discouraged from doing this by McGarrett. Chin Ho finds out that Shem's car is registered to a "William T. Shiner," who doesn't exist. McGarrett describes Shem as "a marksman," though no evidene has been offered to substantiate this yet. Chin Ho goes to Shem's apartment, having instantaneously managed to obtain a search warrant. At this place, Chin finds trophies attesting to Shem's shooting abilities. He also finds a drawer full of pistols. HPD headquarters tracks down Shem under his real name from a thumbprint on an application he made for a commercial driver's license.

Meanwhile, in the bunker, Shem has been listening to crappy rock music on his radio and also singing the theme from the Howdy Doody Show. Danno uses the helicopter to fly to the state mental hospital where Shem was treated after incidents of sniping. He soon returns with Dr. Fernando (William Croarkin). When they arrive, there are two people in the helicopter — the pilot and some guy in a sport shirt, which is not Danno. But seconds later, Danno and Fernando get out of the helicopter, which doesn't make sense, because it only holds two people!

McGarrett grills Fernando as to Shem's sniping history, which consists of two incidents — one in Vietnam, and the second, less than a year ago in Hawaii at the university, where Shem shot out windows in the women's dormitory. Neither of these resulted in any injuries or deaths. Just then, the off-duty cop Paul is seen trying to get close to Shem, but his gun jams and as he flees down the hill from the bunker. Shem, who is laughing maniacally, shoots him in the back. Paul later dies from his injuries.

McGarrett, who is super pissed that Shem was allowed out of the hospital, freaks out when Fernando tries to explain his patient's "unstable personality" as motivated by "guilt over an incestuous drive towards a mother, sometimes a sister." McGarrett screams: "What's the reality of it?" When McGarrett says "Why didn't he commit suicide?", Fernando replies, "That's exactly what he's doing." Fernando tries to talk Shem down, but the sniper is more concerned with lining up shells from the bullets (over 20) which he has already fired. Shem takes more shots at the doctor.

Shem's wife Sue (Annette O'Toole) is driven to the scene quickly, but she doesn't want to co-operate, though McGarrett tells her they just need her to talk to her husband over a bullhorn. She tells them that 13 months ago when she married Shem, he took her to Maui for their honeymoon and then promptly abandoned her to contact his mother. Maui Police are radioed, and McGarrett says they want the mother on "a plane" to Oahu as soon as possible. The mother refuses to come, but a subpoena forces her to. She arrives at the scene by helicopter, again in record time.

Played by Jeanne Cooper, Shem's mother Ann is an utter bitch who describes Oahu as a "pesthole" and Shem's wife as a "tramp." She refuses to believe that the person shooting people is related to her: "That is not my son. He is not a maniac who goes around shooting at people for no reason."

McGarrett finally gives up on her, getting the helicopter to drop tear gas on the bunker while a squad of cops goes up the hill on one side, and Danno on the other. Danno takes a shot, but is wounded, but after more tear gas is dropped, Danno finally knocks Shem off. When McGarrett goes up to check Shem's body, he finds the expended shells arranged in a heart with the word "MOM" in the middle of it.

I don't understand if this episode of Five-O, which I don't think would go over particularly well today, is trying to tell us something, other than just making for a fast-paced and action-packed TV show. Maybe the message is that the regulations surrounding purchasing a gun in 1971, either country-wide or state-wide, were too relaxed? Jack Lord was known for an anti-gun stance, but I don't know if he would have had enough influence this early in Five-O's production to get someone to create a show with this theme.

There is also the issue of the inability of the hospital system to adequately care for people who had mental problems. According to one web page, "Beginning in the late 1950s, states like California moved patients from hospitals to various kinds of 'homes.' Hospital wards closed as the patients left. By 1967, California had already deinstitutionalized more than half of its state hospital patients. That same year involuntary hospitalization was virtually abolished except in extreme cases. Thus, by the early 1970s, California had moved most mentally ill patients out of its state hospitals and had made it very difficult to get them back into a hospital if they relapsed and needed additional care."* This is reflected in what Fernando tells McGarrett when trying to explain why Shem was released into the general population despite his mental illness.

*A condensed version of what is on the WWW page.

WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN?

This is a good question. I dunno if there is some reference to a song or something with words like "gun" and "candy" in them. Maybe the suggestion is that in wanting "candy," Shem is just like a little kid?

EPISODE PROMO:

Click here to see the promo. Use the back key in your browser to return to this screen.

CASUALTY LIST:

MORE TRIVIA:

GALLERY:

Click on images below to see them large size. Use the back button in your browser to return to this page.

OR...

Click here for a slide show of all the large images.

Return to Quick Index


79. (S04E07) “Air Cargo — Dial For Murder” ★★½  BOOK HIM, DANNO 

Original air date: 11/2/71 — Opening CreditsEnd Credits
Director: Michael O'Herlihy; Producer: William Finnegan; Writer: Meyer Dolinsky; Music: Richard Shores
Timings: Teaser: 3:05; Main Titles: 0:58; Act One: 12:38; Act Two: 12:08; Act Three: 13:10; Act Four: 8:07; End Credits: 0:35; Total Time: 50:41.

QUICK PLOT:

Employees of an air cargo company conspire to steal expensive shipments including drugs, resulting in a woman's death.

Click here to read Full Plot.

REVIEW:

Jerry Turner (Ward Benson), working undercover for Asiam Air Cargo at the Honolulu airport, is murdered during an investigation of a theft racket. He is crushed by a heavy load on a forklift which is triggered by John Malcolm (Bill Bigelow).

Five-O is soon on the scene, conferring with Arnold Cook (Barney Phillips), airport security boss. Cook's actual job is never defined in the show. At the beginning of the episode, Turner leaves him a message at the "Airport security message center." McGarrett tells Cook that he "gave Jerry his first job." Cook says he wanted to call the cops regarding the theft ring, but "front office said it would kill business." Cook describes Jerry as "my undercover man." Cook later provides Five-O with "that personnel file you were after. Who's who in Air Cargo from director to janitor."

When questioned by McGarrett, John Malcolm has little to say. The same can be said of his co-workers, who either don't know anything or are afraid of being labelled as snitches.

Eric Ling (James Hong), cargo systems engineer and troubleshooter for Asiam, tells McGarrett that it is unlikely this was a case of homicide, instead just an industrial accident. But when Ling meets soon afterwards with Hal Sullivan (Don Chastain), director of the company, Ling knows exactly what is going on and says he wants out: "I never bargained for murder." Sullivan tells him, "Whatever became of our inscrutable Oriental?" Ling calls Sullivan "stupid," but the response is "Sometimes killing is necessary." Sullivan tells Ling he can go, that he is "free as a bird," but shortly after, Ling is garroted and sent to Tokyo in what looks like a refrigerated shipment of food.

Oahu Hospital is concerned about a late-arriving shipment of "a new drug" glucagon, needed to keep Joanna Grayson (Sheri Rice), one of their patients suffering from cardiac shock, alive. Grayson's husband Fred (Michael Strong) is particularly concerned about his wife's deteriorating condition.

When Anita Putnam (Marion Ross), one of Asiam's customer service representatives, notices that the glucagon, which actually has arrived, has a value of $130,000, she redirects it to the company's will-call warehouse, where it will be likely sold to the highest bidder and the shipper will likely launch an insurance claim for lost goods.

The Five-O team investigate several angles connected with the case. Chin Ho finds a telephone answering machine used by the thieves in the fleabag Aloha Hotel above a herbal shop in Chinatown. Danno interviews Sullivan, who is very oily, telling Danno, "I'm in the charm business. I massage and caress customers till they purr. I send the wives on island junkets and I get girls for the daddies."

After Anita's name is found in Turner's case notebook, Kono discovers that Anita's daughter is a dope fiend, sniffing coke and taking LSD, and her mother has spent a lot of money getting her out of jail and receiving treatment, reflected by increased deposits from the theft gang in Anita's bank account for her co-operation.

When McGarrett visits Anita, he makes her an offer that she can't refuse. As part of her co-operation, Anita reports a shipment of expensive jade worth almost $250,000 from Fred Grayson's own company prepared at Five-O's request to test the "system." However, Grayson has put a bomb into the package, seeking revenge because his wife passed away before an expedited second shipment of glucagon arrived.

The jade shipment is diverted from its destination by John Malcolm and taken to the will-call warehouse as per the usual procedure, and when someone picks it up, McGarrett and Danno tail them to Sullivan's place. Having been alerted to the bomb in the package, McGarrett rushes in and throws the package over a nearby cliff where it explodes.

Sullivan tells McGarrett he has no case, since the evidence was destroyed, but McGarrett tells him that when the perhaps-already-arrested Malcolm is busted, he will be "glad to trade his life for yours."

This episode has its good points, but Chastain's performance as the villain is ineffectual and Marion Ross, who was outstanding as Nurse Lovallo in S02E15, "Blind Tiger," annoyingly primps her hair every time we see her and only really comes to life in her big confrontation with McGarrett, where she is sweating something fierce.

It doesn't make sense to me how and where Fred Grayson gets the dynamite for his bomb. When his secretary Corinne Wilson (Patricia Herman) finds the packaging from this explosive in a garbage can, it looks like it came from a department store! And why does Grayson use real jade which is worth a fortune in the package?

The score is by Richard Shores and contains some synthesizer-like sounds typical of the composer as well as the "memories" theme, heard a couple of times, and the "trombone interval" theme.

CASUALTY LIST:

MORE TRIVIA:

GALLERY:

Click on images below to see them large size. Use the back button in your browser to return to this page.

OR...

Click here for a slide show of all the large images.

Return to Quick Index


80. (S04E08) “For A Million ... Why Not?” ★★

Original air date: 11/9/71 — Opening CreditsEnd Credits
Director: Ron Winston; Producer: William Finnegan; Writers: Jerome Coopersmith (teleplay), Eric Bercovici & Jerry Ludwig (story); Music: Stock
Timings: Teaser: 2:36; Main Titles: 0:57; Act One: 9:23; Act Two: 14:29; Act Three: 10:03; Act Four: 12:41; End Credits: 0:35; Total Time: 50:44.

QUICK PLOT:

While McGarrett is at a trial on the Big Island, Danno leads the investigation of a robbery of $6 million being transferred between bank branches.

Click here to read Full Plot.

REVIEW:

Sam Melville stars as Hawkins, mastermind behind a bank robbery. He is an aggrieved Vietnam veteran with a huge chip on his shoulder, angry that when he returned home with "a wound in the gut," he was "called a monster by some long-haired creep with a beard." He says "We'll set things right in this country. We're gonna stop them from burying us with peace and poetry and pot." It sounds like he wants to take his share of the heist and use it to set up a right-wing organization which will take care of them uppity hippie types.

His gang includes Ray Galvin (Robert Fields), a dance instructor who masquerades in the show as a cop, Carol Lindsey (Leigh Christian), a hot, tall, skinny blonde who works in the bank and is pals with Galvin, Fred Noonan (Al Harrington), an ex-con bank robber who is the group's muscle, and Blumberg (Jack Kruschen), the motormouthed office manager of Tiki Gods Company, which is used as a front to ship the stolen money to the mainland.

Noonan works at this company; whether Hawkins also works there is hard to determine. He seems to use its office as a place where he can feed his goldfish which are in a large bottle, drink Miller beer (a real beer, not some typical bogus-brand TV beer) and prepare rifle cartridges to have armor-piercing capabilities.

At the beginning of the show, the gang makes an attempt to rob a bank, hoping to get the six million dollars in the vault at its 4634 Kilauea Avenue location. In Google maps today, this is still the address of a branch of the Bank of Hawaii, though it looks much different than in the show. Galvin pretends to have an anxiety attack, and the gang leaves without completing their job. I really don't understand what is the point of this sequence.

Later, Hawkins and Noonan pay a visit to a print shop, where the owner, Carlson, has created a bogus invoice, number 1409, to be used in connection with shipping the money from Oahu to the mainland. The invoices show Tiki Gods' address as 15 Kakaako Road, Honolulu, Hawaii 96802 and are dated August 23, 1971. Glenn Cannon appears briefly as Carlson, who is shot dead by Hawkins.

After the failed robbery, the manager of the bank, Harvey Shaw (Wendell Martin), decides to spread the cash reserves between different branches, having been freaked out by the attempt to steal it all from the one — his — branch, and arranges for the Isle-Pac Armored Car Service to handle the job. Their truck, via a narrow road, eventually ends up at what looks like the Diamond Head tunnel where Hawkins' gang stages a bogus accident to confront the truck using a Volkswagen van rented from Beachboy Camper Rentals.

Two of the truck's guards are shot dead, one in a very gory manner, and a third one is disabled by pouring what looks like acid through the roof of the truck, which produces a poisonous gas. Fleeing with the truck to some out-of-the-way location, the gang loads not only the money, but also the armored car in a Seatrain container, which is then loaded on a ship for the mainland.

In this episode, McGarrett is on the Big Island testifying at the trial of Johnny Oporta (see S04E02, "No Bottles ... No Cans ... No People," earlier this season). This trial has had a change of venue from Honolulu. McGarrett keeps up with the investigation by phone. The quality of the calls is terrible and Danno has to strain to hear what his boss is saying. Was the inter-island phone system in Hawaii really that bad? Usually calls to the mainland or overseas suffer from these problems. At one point, McGarrett wants to return to Honolulu, but the judge in the trial (Donald Over) forbids him to leave Hilo.

The way Five-O gets a major clue in the case is far-fetched. When Carlson is shot, the hot metal type he used to create the invoice which is no longer in a frame falls all over the floor. This type is then sent to the lab, who have to check each individual letter to see if the ink on that letter is fresh and was just used to create something which was connected with Carlson's murder.

Che Fong is not in the show, but in the forensics lab, Seth Sakai and some other guy are seen working on this type-identification project. When Kono asks when he will be finished, Sakai says in Japanese "So kantana dekiru monka," which he says means "don't hold your breath" (it actually translates as "this job is not easy to finish"). In the next show, Che Fong does the same in Chinese.

I used to work in a printing shop (though not one with hot metal) in the 1970s, and this whole business seems highly unrealistic. How could they tell the difference between ink from the day before and from a week before, if the latter (or even the former) still existed on the metal type? As well, the letter "O" which Sakai identifies, is a totally different type than the one in the logo at the top of the invoices.

Nevertheless, after examining this evidence, Sakai comes up with eight letters with black ink and 4 numbers with red ink (1, 4, 0 and 9) which suggest an invoice. He tells Kono that "using the eighth factorial formula," there are around 40,000 possible combinations of the letters. He is quite correct, the actual figure is 40,320. Later, at the Five-O offices, Danno has a McGarrett-like brainstorm that the letters spell TIKI GODS. Inasmuch as they had they questioned Noonan at this company earlier, they go to check it out again, not the first time that someone is under suspicion by Five-O because they have a criminal record!

At Tiki Gods, Danno gets the boss Hanley (Harry Williams) to check invoices with the four numbers and they determine that something is fishy, because one invoice with the number 1409 has been revised from a local delivery address to another one on the mainland, and the weight of the shipment was considerably more than it should have been.

The container with the armored car arrives at its destination, Oakland (which probably took 5 or 6 days), and the gang members, all having originally gone to different cities in the States, presumably to confuse the cops, assemble there in a warehouse on the docks where the container, its needle-in-a-haystack location amongst all those on the ship having been easily determined, is driven on a truck by Noonan and the armored car is unloaded. Although no one seems to have been following the truck with the container, only moments after Hawkins prepares to blow open the back door of the armored car, Danno and a bunch of very heavily-armed cops are outside.

Despite the fact that the nitro has been handled with kid gloves for the last couple of minutes, Hawkins goes outside and throws it up in the air and when it hits the ground, it explodes near the cops. Prior to this inside, Noonan looks like he was running to the driver's side of the armored car. The camera has already zoomed in on a bunch of boxes which are in a doorway leading to outside, and suddenly the armored car, which is now driven by Hawkins, comes barrelling through these boxes.

The cops blast the truck and Hawkins is wounded. There is no sign of where Noonan is. The truck runs into some car and bursts into flame and Hawkins (and presumably Noonan) are roasted alive.

Soon after this, Danno talks to McGarrett, who has complimented Danno on his good work while he has been away from the office at the trial in Hilo. McGarrett reports that Oporta was found guilty of three counts of first-degree murder, with the result likely life in prison with no possibility of parole.

I found this episode, the theme of which seems to be "normal people get together to pull off some big caper," to be kind of dull, not helped by the fact that Fields, who is first in the list of the guest stars in the end credits, is not a particularly exciting actor. Melville's part is not particularly well developed either.

There are quite a few questions. For example, why does the gang transport not only the money to the mainland, but also the armored truck that the money came in? I know they have to dispose of the truck, but why don't they just put the money in some containers of tiki merchandise being shipped? The fact that the truck weighs more than the merchandise the container supposedly contains is a big clue which helps to lead to the gang's downfall.

How do the crooks know the exact route that the truck will take from the bank to its branches? Maybe determining this is the job of Carol, their "girl on the inside"?

And finally, the amount of money given to some of the gang members (a million each) seems far out of proportion to their participation in the scheme. The six million is divided up into a million each for Galvin, Noonan, and Blumberg (!) with the remaining three million going to Hawkins. Lindsey puts the squeeze on Galvin, her boyfriend, for a million when he tries to dump her, since she is only getting $50,000. She tells him she wants a full share, adding that her lawyer has a letter "just in case something violent happens to me." When Galvin brings this up with Hawkins, Galvin is convinced at gunpoint to split his share with his girl friend.

The music is stock, and contains the marimba and trombone interval themes.

WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN?

When they find out the money is being split up between banks and moved the next day, and Melville says that their plan will finally be put into action, Blumberg tells the gang, "You mean the whole plan just the way we discussed it?" Hawkins tells him, "Including your part of the plan, Mr. Blumberg, if you have no objections." Blumberg tells him, "My objections I can live with. For a million dollars, why not?" At the end of the show after McGarrett compliments Danno that he did "a good job on this one," Danno, without having heard the earlier comment, replies, "Well, for $184.50 a week take-home ... why not?"

EPISODE PROMO:

Click here to see the promo. Use the back key in your browser to return to this screen.

CASUALTY LIST:

MORE TRIVIA:

GALLERY:

Click on images below to see them large size. Use the back button in your browser to return to this page.

OR...

Click here for a slide show of all the large images.

Return to Quick Index


81. (S04E09) “The Burning Ice” ★★½  BOOK HIM (2) 

Original air date: 11/16/71 — Opening CreditsEnd Credits
Director: Paul Stanley; Producer: William Finnegan; Writer: Ken Pettus; Music: Don B. Ray
Timings: Teaser: 2:38; Main Titles: 0:58; Act One: 8:07; Act Two: 22:14; Act Three: 9:21; Act Four: 6:51; End Credits: 0:33; Total Time: 50:42.

QUICK PLOT:

A doctor becomes a suspect in the murder of his wife when McGarrett finds holes in the confessed killer's story.

Click here to read Full Plot.

REVIEW:

Dr. Alexander Southmore (Jackie Cooper) wants to knock off his wife Melissa (Linda Ryan), with whom he has a "strained" relationship. He has asked for a divorce, but she will not give him one. So he hires David Harper (Lou Antonio), a man with a terminal illness, to murder her and take the rap.

Southmore chose Harper after snooping in hospital records to find someone who doesn't have long to live. As well, Harper has a son, Michael, in the Lahaina School for Retarded Children on Maui. Not having worked for a long time, Harper is desperate for money to support his son, but how the doctor would have known this is a good question. The doctor makes a large contribution to the school ($75,000) via Harper so Michael will be looked after indefinitely.

As the show opens in the evening, Southmore is working on his hobby, restoring antique cars in the garage of his house. Melissa shows up, but it is not made clear if she is still living at home. Melissa makes some comment about Southmore's girl friend Betty Viati, who is a nurse at a medical clinic he operates, wondering if Betty is "getting tired of the waiting game." Southmore says Betty "went to visit her parents tonight," suggesting that Betty is living with him now. When he asks his wife what she has been doing this evening, Melissa replies coldly, "Are you really interested?"

Melissa goes and lies down in a chaise longue by the swimming pool. Harper has followed her to the house in his car. What we then see suggests that Harper shoots Melissa twice, once from a distance and once in the head, then he steals Melissa's jewelry and purse.

Five-O is soon on the case. Southmore claims he didn't hear the shooting, because he was using a drill while working on one of his cars, which covered up the noise. This is a very large drill, which I am skeptical one would use while restoring cars — it looks like a drill that would be used with wood, not metal.

When Southmore heard his maid Amanda, who saw the aftermath of the murder, screaming, he ran out of the garage, but Harper, seen in a flashback from the doctor's point of view, started shooting at him. He describes Harper as "just a shadow" and says that he saw Harper's car, "an older, inexpensive car of some kind" as Harper drove away. Harper had not driven down the driveway to the doctor's house, but was parked up on the street.

McGarrett is interested to learn that Southmore owns a gun –- a Smith and Wesson .38 –- which is the same as the one used to kill his wife. McGarrett visits Southmore at his clinic, where Betty Viati and Southmore have just been talking about Melissa's demise, whether he hated her so much that he would have killed her, which Southmore emphatically denies. With Betty not in the room, McGarrett brings up the business of the gun. Southmore pulls it out of a desk, which seems odd. Why would it be at the clinic? Che Fong later test-fires the gun and determines that it was not the one that killed Southmore's wife.

Charlie Ling (Tom Fujiwara), a fence, gets a call from Harper. Harper had called "The Guru," who told him to contact Ling. Perhaps we are again riffing on the meme that "Honolulu was not such a big town in the early 70's." Ling meets Harper, who wants to sell the hot jewelry which he stole from Melissa. Ling is surprised when his offer of only $1,000 is accepted, considering it is later mentioned that it is worth $30,000. Soon after this, Danno just happens to visit Ling as per McGarrett's order to "get the word to every fence in town." It seems like Danno and Ling have a connection from before, and Danno quickly figures out that Ling is involved with the stolen goods.

Ling has set up a meeting with Harper at Sea Life Park to make the payoff of the thousand bucks. When Harper sees the men from Five-O, who are also there, he attempts to flee, but soon collapses, out of breath. Taken to the Five-O office, Harper gives a detailed explanation of how he killed Melissa, and there is other evidence which makes this a cut and dried case, including tire tracks from Harper's car parked outside Southmore's the night before. Harper is taken to HPD headquarters to be booked, but he collapses again when his mug shot pictures are being taken, and he is rushed to the hospital.

When Danno and Kono go to Harper's place and talk to his wife Harriet (Loretta Leversee), she is incredulous that her husband could be involved with a homicide. Harriet is taken to the hospital, where she attempts to get him to explain what is going on, but he dies of a brain hemorrhage. The resident doctor (Michael Leong) tells McGarrett that Harper only had a few weeks to live, because he had leukemia.

At the Five-O office, after Harriett explains about their son, McGarrett tells the team "something's wrong." Kono digs up information that Harper was a conscientious objector during the Korean War, and he refused military service, saying that "under no circumstances could he take the life of another human being." When McGarrett talks to Southmore, showing him pictures of Harper and asking about whether Harper could be the killer, the doctor has a very smug attitude.

The usual McGarrett brainstorm (with the help of his transparent map) erupts after examining details about the time frame surrounding what Harper was doing on the night of the murder. A search for the gun which Harper says he threw in the Ala Wai Canal has turned up nothing, but McGarrett suddenly realizes that the gun is the one which the doctor turned over to him. Che Fong analyzes the barrel of the gun further and discovers that it is one-thousandth of an inch bigger than the standard bore.

To get evidence to confirm this, Kono goes to Southmore's garage. There is a "boring machine" there, presumably connected with Southmore's hobby, and Kono, pretending to be a phone company repairman, grabs some shavings from the area of the machine.

This whole sequence is dumb. Kono was already at the house at the beginning of the investigation digging a bullet out of the garage wall. Though the doctor is probably not home now, isn't there a risk that someone like the servant who shows him around might recognize him? Kono takes the shavings so Che Fong can prove with spectographic and X-ray diffusion analysis that the murder weapon was rebored. This seems very far-fetched. Also, wouldn't Kono have needed a warrant to get the shavings?

At the end of the show, confronted with the evidence, all of which he ridicules, Southmore wants to talk to his lawyer. Too bad McGarrett didn't check the doctor's bank records to prove that $75,000 was recently withdrawn and given to Harper! As well, McGarrett should have been suspicious when Southmore described the fleeing Harper's 1950s-era Dodge as "an older, inexpensive car." Considering the doctor's interest in antique cars, one would expect that he would be familiar with "older" models.

The score by Ray features numerous stock musical motifs, all of which are integrated into the story well, including the bonging bell and a brief reference to the memories theme when Harper dies in the hospital. Loretta Leversee does a good job as Harper's anguished wife Harriet. The music at the very end of the show does not end on the note we expect!

The Asian woman who plays Betty Viati, the doctor's mistress, does not get a credit at the end of the show, even though she has a speaking part. Comparing her to a nurse in S01E17, One For The Money, reveals she is played by Elithe Aguiar, who is credited in that show. She tells Southmore that he should take some time off and let "Dr. Berdahl" take his calls, but this doctor's name is not seen on the sign at the front of the clinic where Southmore works. The names of the doctors there are Patrick Gleason, Joseph Ahuna IV and Ronald M. Nipp. The names "Patrick Gleason" and "Joseph Ahuna" will be later seen in "Vashon: The Patriarch" on a lobby sign where they are identified as associates of Harvey Matheson Drew. Roland Nip is an actor who appeared later in "See How She Runs" and "The Pagoda Factor," as well as an episode of the Five-0 reboot.

The woman who plays Amanda, the doctor's maid, who screams upon seeing the aftermath of the murder at the beginning of the show, does not get a credit either.

WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN?

McGarrett tells Danno: "I want you to get the word to every fence in town. Let them know just how hot this ice [the stolen jewelry] is, and if they touch it, they're gonna get burned."

EPISODE PROMO:

Click here to see the promo. Use the back key in your browser to return to this screen.

CASUALTY LIST:

MORE TRIVIA:

GALLERY:

Click on images below to see them large size. Use the back button in your browser to return to this page.

OR...

Click here for a slide show of all the large images.

Return to Quick Index


82. (S04E10) “Rest In Peace, Somebody” ★★★½

Original air date: 11/23/71 — Opening CreditsEnd Credits
Director: Paul Stanley; Producer: William Finnegan; Writer: John D.F. Black; Music: Don B. Ray
Timings: Teaser: 5:11; Main Titles: 0:58; Act One: 8:52; Act Two: 12:16; Act Three: 11:31; Act Four: 11:15; End Credits: 0:34; Total Time: 50:37.

QUICK PLOT:

McGarrett receives cryptic messages and phone calls threatening to kill someone important, as well as clues to the identity of the victim.

Click here to read Full Plot.

REVIEW:

This episode and S01E10, "Yesterday Died And Tomorrow Won't Be Born," have a lot in common, aside from the fact they were both written by John D.F. Black. In each of these shows, an aggrieved individual targets McGarrett for death or someone whose death would affect McGarrett badly.

In the earlier show, Joseph Trinian (John Larch) served time in the Portsmouth, Maine military prison for 15 years on homicide and other charges. Recently released, he is seeking revenge on people who put him there, including McGarrett, who was the naval intelligence investigator in Korea who broke the case open as well as Walter Stewart, prosecutor at the hearing, who is now the Attorney General of Hawaii. Trinian shoots McGarrett at the beginning of this show, seriously but not fatally, and at the end, disguising himself as a naval officer, attempts to kill Stewart who is watching the Kamehameha Day Parade with the Governor from the Iolani Palace balcony.

In S04E10, this episode, Norm Alden plays Bill Cameron, an HPD patrolman who was kicked off the force after brutally treating suspects. McGarrett was on the police review board and recommended Cameron be dismissed, so Cameron has a huge grudge against him. Cameron plots to kill the Governor, knowing that this will lead to McGarrett's downfall, because it will suggest to the public that McGarrett is incompetent at doing his job. The Governor will be watching the current Kamehameha Day parade when Cameron's assassination attempt is to take place.

McGarrett arrives at work early one morning to find a key in an envelope for him. The mail, interestingly, is just dumped at this early hour by the postman in front of the Five-O office door in the hall at the Palace; there is no mail slot on the door.

After this, Cameron taunts McGarrett in a sinister fashion over the phone calling him things like "Sherlock," "dummy," "puppet on a string," "great detective," and "a lousy cop." He leaves messages containing clues regarding the the key and the killing he intends to pull off within 48 hours in difficult-to-access places like Kono's refrigerator and the dashboard and trunk of Danno's car. He also creates a false alarm with Chin Ho's garage and sends a nasty message to Chin's wife. In addition to this, he gives tips to Eddie Sherman, entertainment and gossip columnist of the Honolulu Advertiser which McGarrett has to phone Sherman about, acting on Cameron's instructions.

When Cameron calls McGarrett on the Five-O chief's private number, he keeps the call short to avoid having them traced with the exception of one, which is tracked down in an unbelievable (for the show) 54 seconds! Of course, when HPD arrive at the phone booth where the call originated, Cameron is long gone.

Five-O is having no luck tracking the disgraced cop down with the clues he is leaving, so Cameron sneaks into McGarrett's office, dumps paint from a can which he punctures all over McGarrett's desk and then leaves a trail which goes down the Iolani Palace stairs and the steps outside, all the way over to the building which houses the Governor's office, the door to which opens with the key McGarrett received at the beginning of the show.

This paint business is one thing about this episode I don't like. A U.S. gallon is 3.78 liters, versus a Canadian one which is 4.54 liters. I seriously doubt if there would be enough paint to create such a trail, given how thick this trail is in some places, not to mention the mess at the beginning and end of the trail. I would like to take an old paint can and try to duplicate this stunt myself, but I am sure I would be arrested for spoiling the environment.

One thing that can't be denied is this show has terrific suspense. In the previous show, Joseph Trinian's actions were seen in point-of-view shots from the character until about the 20th minute when his face was shown as his wife opened the front door of their house (a chilling moment). This episode shows Cameron's face, also around the 20th minute, but only partially.

McGarrett finally gets a clue as to who is tormenting him because Cameron slips up and uses an expression — "tin idol" — which he called McGarrett during the hearing which led to his dismissal. McGarrett hears this on the most recent call from Cameron he taped on his Uher 4000 recorder, and when he listens to it repeatedly, in a "passing of time" which seems to take hours, his memory is finally jogged. Of course, every time he stops the tape after rewinding to hear this phrase over and over, it is in exactly the spot he wants. When we see Cameron in a flashback at the hearing, the first time we see his whole face it is only in three very brief shots of a few frames each, starting around the 37 minute mark. Finally, around 37:12, we see Cameron where he is saying the whole phrase, followed by a freeze frame.

The usually brainstorming McGarrett isn't totally smart prior to this during the episode, though. He is kind of dumb in a couple of scenes. First, he opens his desk drawer at Cameron's request and second, he gets Danno to open his (Danno's) car trunk to reveal a fish inside. He should have called the bomb squad in both cases.

At the end of the show, there is the Kamehameha Day parade outside, which the Governor obligatorily has to watch. It's only after a lot of tooth-pulling that the Governor decides to wear a bullet-proof vest after McGarrett insists. There is a huge police presence in the Iolani Palace to protect the governor on all levels, but Cameron manages to overpower one of the heavily-armed cops and take his place.

When the Governor is being hustled out of the building, Cameron, who is an ace marksman, takes several shots at him. While there are cops in front of and to the sides of the Governor, there is no one directly behind him (McGarrett and Kono are sort of on the sides), which is where Cameron aims. You would think Cameron would go for a head shot, but he just shoots the Governor and the bullets hit the vest, knocking the Governor down. Danno, who is nearby and also an ace shot, plugs Cameron six times. Cameron expires thinking the Governor is dead, but McGarrett sets him straight. As he croaks, Cameron says, "If he's not dead, why did I do all this?" to which McGarrett responds, "Yeah, why."

The Governor seems to be unharmed, thanks to the bulletproof vest that McGarrett forced him to wear; Kono, on the other hand, suffers undetermined, but presumably minor, injuries. (I think Kono was also wearing a vest.) The show ends with McGarrett telling Kono, "Some guys will do anything to get Kamehameha Day off." Nothing is said as to the condition of the Governor, which is presumably OK!

The music is by Ray and includes some electronic-sounding passages in addition to the usual stock tracks. The children's song from S02E25, "Kiss the Queen Goodbye" is heard as a float passes by during the King Kamehameha Day parade near the end of the show. There does not seem to be any duplication of shots of bands, floats, etc. during the parade between this show and the previous one from the first season.

WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN?

The "somebody" in the title refers to the fact that for most of the show, McGarrett doesn't know who will be killed.

EPISODE PROMO:

Click here to see the promo. Use the back key in your browser to return to this screen.

CASUALTY LIST:

MORE TRIVIA:

GALLERY:

Click on images below to see them large size. Use the back button in your browser to return to this page.

OR...

Click here for a slide show of all the large images.

Return to Quick Index


83. (S04E11) “A Matter of Mutual Concern” ★★½

Original air date: 11/30/71 — Opening CreditsEnd Credits
Director: Ron Winston; Producer: William Finnegan; Writer: Alvin Sapinsley; Music: Richard Shores
Timings: Teaser: 2:30; Main Titles: 0:58; Act One: 12:34; Act Two: 13:40; Act Three: 5:57; Act Four: 14:23; End Credits: 0:34; Total Time: 50:43.

QUICK PLOT:

A gang war is about to break out when a mainland syndicate is trying to take over several operations run by ethnic types.

Click here to read Full Plot.

REVIEW:

This episode is so outrageous, it's hard to know what to say about it. Just as a story, it does makes sense, though.

An advance man from the Mob in Miami, Francis J. ("French") McCoy, is sent to Hawaii to look into new territory for his boss "Big Uncle." He ends up dead in a particularly gruesome manner — stabbed to death in the chest and stuck on a pole in the ocean below the tide line with one of his little fingers chopped off, which is seen close-up in nauseating detail after he is hauled out of the drink. The question for Five-O is which of the four island gang bosses involved in "dope, prostitution, extortion, gambling and refugee smuggling" — Samoan Tasi Tanavasu (Manu Tupou), Japanese Jack Afuso (Seth Sakai), Korean Kim Lo Lang (Marc Marno) or Chinese Li Wing (David Opatoshu) — was responsible for the inquisitive McCoy's execution.

What is notable about this episode is the heavy dose of racist terms from two of the gang bosses — Tasi and Kim. It's almost like a kid trying to get a rise from someone by swearing repeatedly. Of course, one should remember that it is whoever wrote the screenplay who really made these remarks, and this case it was Alvin Sapinsley — his first script for the series. Sapinsley went on to write another fourth season episode which really pushed the envelope — "Skinhead" — and then went on to contribute what are some of the series' greatest shows, including the "Vashon Trilogy," its sequel "The Case Against McGarrett," and "One Big Happy Family."

Although chopped-off pinkie fingers are well-known in connection with the Japanese yakuza where a ritual called yubitsume is occasionally performed, in this show, it is supposedly also something practiced by Samoans, though I can't find any reference to this. Because of this, Tasi, the leader of the Samoan gang, is the number one suspect in McCoy's death.

Subsequently, cops and Five-O raid a back room at Tasi's bowling alley where gambling is in progress. When Chin Ho is ordered to frisk him, Tasi says, "I know my rights, and one of them is not to be felt by this fat-handed Oriental." Danno comments, "Tasi, haven't you heard? All men are brothers," and Chin frisks Tasi, saying "He's clean." Tasi comments, "Not any longer!"

Tasi is hustled down to Five-O headquarters, where he screams loudly at McGarrett, who just screams back. Tasi tells McGarrett "I do not practice the superstitions of my ancestors. I did not kill that man." McGarrett isn't going to arrest Tasi, though. Instead, Tasi is told that his life isn't worth anything if he is let go, because whether he did it or not, he is the number one suspect in McCoy's death. Tasi starts to leave, saying "I'll go at once to my bowling alley. I'll not go visit that stupid Jap, or that powdery Chinaman, or the gook slob," referring to the other three gang leaders. McGarrett takes this opportunity to tell him "This is Hawaii, U.S.A. It's time for your English lesson. Repeat slowly after me: Japanese, Chinese, Korean." Tasi gives McGarrett the raspberry and departs! After Tasi leaves, Kono comments, "Are those lizard shoes he wears, or does he go barefooted?"

McGarrett and Danno go to meet with "the powdery Chinaman" Li Wing. At Li's front gate, Kono tells the guard, "Lock up those dogs ... if they bite me, they're gonna get rabies!" Unlike in S01E15, "Face of the Dragon," where David Opatoshu, also pretending to be Chinese, was given some moderately passable makeup, here he has no makeup at all, aside from his white hair. Trying to accept this guy as Asian really pushes "suspension of disbelief" into another galaxy. Li, speaking in a stereotypically "polite" Chinese way, doesn't tell McGarrett anything he wants to know. Instead, his nephew, Lai Po (Michael Leong) gives McGarrett a bunch of mouth telling him to quit hassling his uncle, saying "He doesn't know anything ... he just told you that four times. Is there a prize for five times, Mr. McGarrett? If not, get off his back!"

Soon summoned to a meeting of the gangs by Li to discuss a "matter of grave mutual concern," Tasi is also a suspect in McCoy's death, especially since during a previous recent meeting, he "very strongly and volubly urged that [McCoy] be murdered." Tasi again denies involvement, saying that someone is trying to frame him and refers to the other three leaders as "cruds and foreigners" and that he doesn't dirty his mouth by talking to them. He leaves the meeting in disgust.

Li delegates Afuso — "someone who in all the years I have known him has never made an impetuous move" — to knock off Tasi, but Kim goes to Tasi and tips him off, obviously expecting something in return. When Tasi shows up at Afuso's warehouse, he sneaks up behind Afuso who is waiting for him and stabs him in the back. But Kim has also called McGarrett and told him to show up at the warehouse if he wants "a bargain in dead beef."

Five-O and HPD arrive just as Tasi is leaving, and there's a great chase with them and Tasi swerving dangerously in their boat-like cars around the docks. (Tasi is driving a Lincoln Continental.) When he's caught, Tasi says to McGarrett, "Speedometer goes to 120 ... couldn't get it past 90." McGarrett replies, "Tell Ralph Nader."

The Miami mob sends a hit man named Jake Hirsch who looks like an Elvis impersonator (Nick Nickolas) to Honolulu. McGarrett and Chin Ho meet him at the airport and engage in various banter about Hirsch's constitutional rights, after which McGarrett tells him to take a hike. As Hirsch heads back to his plane escorted by Chin, and McGarrett says "Aloha," Hirsch replies, "Aloha to you, pal, and ram it." McGarrett muses: "Someone is trying to run Five-O up a palm tree."

McGarrett gets Li and Kim to come to his office where he tells them "something one of them already knows," that having already gotten Tasi's and Afuso's piece of the action, one of them "has gotten greedy and wants it all." Both of them act dumb. When Li's nephew opens his mouth again telling McGarrett to charge his uncle, McGarrett, addressing him as "sonny," says "I don't have to do anything at all. All I have to do is wait for your uncle to kill him, or for him to kill your uncle."

Since Tasi is busted, and Afuso is dead, Kim meets Li at the War Memorial Natatorium to discuss control of all the local mob rackets. The old man wants a million dollars for his share, but he keeps dropping the price down to half a dollar and Lo says "I wouldn't pay you half a cent."

The plot comes down to a confrontation at Li Wing's place with Kim sneaking into the house to drill the old man in bed. McGarrett appears suddenly and plugs Kim. Li made a deal with McGarrett "with the greatest reluctance" because Kim refused to make a deal with him. As the Korean gangster expires, he mutters "You lousy Chink!" McGarrett whips out a ticket to Taiwan for Li Wing, part of their deal.

The music is by Shores, and not particularly exceptional. The violin theme is heard, and at one point at Li Wing's, it has a "Chinese" sound.

Whether this episode provoked any reaction when it was originally broadcast because of the numerous racist expressions is a good question. No other show from the old series comes anywhere close to this one in this regard.

WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN?

After McGarrett leaves his house, Li Wing tells his nephew "You will present my most solicitous greetings to our three unfriendly allies and tell them that I expect them here at once to discuss a matter of grave, mutual concern.

CASUALTY LIST:

MORE TRIVIA:

GALLERY:

Click on images below to see them large size. Use the back button in your browser to return to this page.

OR...

Click here for a slide show of all the large images.

Return to Quick Index


84. (S04E12) “Nine, Ten — You're Dead” ★★★½

Original air date: 12/14/71 — Opening CreditsEnd Credits
Director: Leo Penn; Producer: William Finnegan; Writer: Mel Goldberg; Music: Harry Geller
Timings: Teaser: 4:06; Main Titles: 0:59; Act One: 9:45; Act Two: 16:42; Act Three: 9:59; Act Four: 8:37; End Credits: 0:34; Total Time: 50:42.

QUICK PLOT:

A syndicate boss seeks revenge when his light-heavyweight boxer's hand is smashed by a punchy ex-fighter.

Click here to read Full Plot.

REVIEW:

Moses Gunn, an actor whose career ranged between Shakespearean drama on stage and two roles in the classic blaxploitation Shaft films, gives an outstanding performance as the washed-up ex-boxer Willy Stone who is reduced to peddling newspapers on the streets of Honolulu.

Stone is following the career of an up-and-coming contender named Robby Davis (Henry Porter). Not wanting Davis to follow in his footsteps and wind up brain-damaged from being constantly pummeled, he tries to talk to the kid during a weigh-in for an upcoming fight against a local contender named Marty Malama, but is brushed off by those around Davis. Prior to the fight, Stone sneaks into Davis's dressing room where the kid is lying on a massage table and smashes his left hand with a wrench.

Reaction from those with an interest in Davis on the mainland is swift, with Matthew "Matty" Edmonds (Albert Paulsen) arriving from Detroit via United Airlines. McGarrett, who knows exactly who Edmonds is, is at the airport to greet him, which seems odd — was he tipped off in advance? Edmonds says, "I came here for some sun and some broads." McGarrett tells him, "In the future, let me suggest you find your action in Detroit and use a sun lamp." When McGarrett brings up the matter of Edmonds having a record, therefore he can't handle Davis like a manager, Edmonds tells him, "A piece of merchandise gets damaged, a man likes to know what happened." McGarrett tells him that is fine, but "Don't even spit on the sidewalk."

Edmonds meets with Dr. Fukata (Seth Sakai), who says that Davis's hand is irreparably damaged, and even if it is "restored," his boxing career is over. Edmonds calls Fukata a "quack," and tells him to get lost. (When Fukata uses medical terminology in his description of Davis's injuries, Edmonds uses a McGarrett-like line, telling him, "English, doctor. Speak English, please."). Edmonds also argues with Cal Phelps (Robert Costa), Davis's manager, slapping him around.

Both these members of the Five-O stock company give excellent performances. Costa is especially good in a scene later in Edmonds' hotel room where Edmonds orders a "soldier" from Detroit (calling 724-4080) to knock off Willy. Phelps tells Edmonds, "The big guys, you know how they operate. That's your league … They'll never okay the contract. You don't hit guys like Willy. Beat up on him like he did Robby, but a hit, no … Pay for a hit if you have to, but later, quietly. On your own. Don't pull a soldier out of Detroit. Don't involve the syndicate." Edmonds doesn't listen to him.

Edmonds goes to visit this big Wolfman Jack-like guy (Edward Shonk, uncredited) who runs a cockfighting business (an actual cockfight is seen), and asks him to finger (just find) Willy. Edmonds pulls out a wad of bills, saying, "I know that you can look into rat holes that the cops don't know about." Soon a reward of $1,000 is offered through the local grapevine for word as to where Willy can be located.

Five-O aren't having much luck locating Stone, motivating McGarrett to bark the usual orders, including a tail on Edmonds. Chin Ho gets a good tip from the phone operator who overheard Edmonds' call to Detroit. McGarrett goes to visit Edmonds who is having a babe (see #1, #2, #3) give him a massage by the pool at his hotel (the Kahala Hilton) and brings this up. Edmonds laughs, saying it doesn't make sense to "hit that punchy ... a guy who doesn't even know what day of the week it is ... he doesn't even know his own name ... that would be real crazy, man."

Meanwhile, on the lam, Stone has abandoned his apartment and has visited Mama (Mama Luna), the owner of Mama's Deli, to beg a bag of food from her. She is about to give him some white bread when he says, "Whole wheat ... white bread ain't no good."

Kono and Chin Ho are assigned to watch people arriving at the airport from Detroit and Chicago to see if any of them match a bunch of mug shots of possible hitmen. Kono completely misses the guy who has been sent, because he is not some typical middle-aged Mafia goon, but Duke (Frank Webb), a young blonde-haired kid who looks like he is in his twenties.

Danno goes to Stone's place, where there is a lot of memorabilia, including a couple of reels of 16mm film, which Danno and McGarrett view later and are impressed by how good Willy was when he was a pro. Danno then goes to Mama's on a tip with Chin. When they arrive there, she asks them, "What's the rap? Selling salami without a license?" Danno wonders where Willy went after she gave him the food and she tells him, "Willy has a thousand friends on this island." Pressed hard by Chin and Danno, she directs them to a bar named Mae's Place on Beretania Street. McGarrett shows up there and Mae (Lynn Hamilton) points him to the basement. Willy tells McGarrett "I did it for that kid," but scared of ending up in jail, he punches McGarrett out and flees. He escapes from Chin and Danno outside.

On the street nearby, a pimp named Fred (Ah Vah) recognizes Willy and puts in a call to Edmonds, though it's a good question how he would know this "direct line." Meanwhile, Willy goes and hide at the Civic Auditorium where he knows the janitor, played by "Lippy" Espinda, who tells Willy he should give himself up.

Edmonds leaves the hotel alone, driving a Mercedes and tailed by Kono. (This car seems kind of unusual for a rental car.) He picks up Duke the hitman in the middle of nowhere, though he just left him beside the hotel's pool where Duke said they should just sit tight instead of pursuing Willy. The two of them stop at the intersection of Date Street and Kapahulu Avenue and then abandon their car. This sequence is similar to one seen in S03E14, "The Double Wall," where some guy in the first car at the intersection was knocked off. In this show, this sequence does not make sense, because Edmonds and Duke would have to have run away from their car, and it is just like they vanished into thin air.

Edmonds and Duke make their way to the Civic Auditorium, though there is no indication how they were tipped off that this is where Willy is hiding out (maybe it was the janitor?). Some woman nearby witnesses them breaking into the door to the dressing rooms and calls the cops.

Finally confronted by Edmonds, Willy says that he smashed the kid's hands because he had seen him fight and "he couldn't have made it": "When he got hit, his legs, they lose that hippity-hop." If the kid was fighting against a "puncher," "His legs, they turn to jelly. He can't move." Edmonds punches Willy in the face, saying "everybody said it ... he could have been the champ." Edmonds tells Duke, "He's all yours," but instead of killing Willy, Duke shoots Edmonds, reminding us of what Phelps said earlier.

As Edmonds, stunned, looks up at Duke from the floor, the hitman tells him, "The contract was always on you, always. You should have known your operation. You take out a contract on a punk like Willy, the boys back in Detroit, they just gotta think you're flipping out. That makes you unreliable." He shoots Edmonds again. As Duke leaves, he says, "Don't sweat it, Willy. I don't kill anybody unless I get paid for it."

After Duke is gone, there is the sound of gunshots outside, and the Five-O team rush into the arena. Willy tells McGarrett, "Busted up the kid's hand to keep him from getting his head busted up like mine. Robby would have ended up just like me." McGarrett and Willy leave, with McGarrett promising "I'll do the best I can" for him.

The acting in this episode is excellent throughout. While Albert Paulsen has the chops to be a very nasty guy, his accent, which sounds German or Eastern European, is really distracting. It would have been a lot better if they had gotten some actor like Alex Rocco to play his part, though just around this time The Godfather was being filmed, so there may have been a shortage of Italian/Mafia type actors. The score is by Harry Geller, one of the best he did for the series.

WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN?

A play on the traditional countdown for the end of a boxing match, which ends with "nine ... ten."

EPISODE PROMO:

Click here to see the promo. Use the back key in your browser to return to this screen.

CASUALTY LIST:

MORE TRIVIA:

GALLERY:

Click on images below to see them large size. Use the back button in your browser to return to this page.

OR...

Click here for a slide show of all the large images.

Return to Quick Index


85. (S04E13) “Is This Any Way To Run A Paradise” ★★½

Original air date: 12/21/71 — Opening CreditsEnd Credits
Director: Michael O'Herlihy; Producer: William Finnegan; Writer: Bill Stratton; Music: Don B. Ray
Timings: Teaser: 3:00; Main Titles: 0:59; Act One: 9:18; Act Two: 12:08; Act Three: 11:02; Act Four: 13:43; End Credits: 0:36; Total Time: 50:46.

QUICK PLOT:

McGarrett searches for an ecology fanatic whose pranks are harmless until he threatens the lives of those people he feels are the cause of the islands' pollution.

Click here to read Full Plot.

REVIEW:

This episode has good intentions, but the casting of the major character leaves a lot to be desired. This is another show concerned with the environment and development like S01E02, "Strangers In Our Own Land," and S03E10, "The Last Eden."

Someone has put a cover on the smokestack of an Oahu incinerator used to burn garbage. This cover is made of sheet aluminum, a quarter inch thick, hinged in the middle, diameter 8 feet 6 inches, and weighs at least 125 pounds. It was carried 142 feet up to the top of the smokestack in order to cap it. There is no indication whether it was just placed on top of the smokestack, though that is quite likely. There is also no sign of a block and tackle or any other means to get it up to the top easily.

Danno goes up to the top of the chimney (not really) and finds a doll-like character of Kaili, which Kono identifies as "one of our ancient Hawaiian gods, the god of battle." Kono seems pleased about the plugging up of the chimney, calling it a "smudge pot."

McGarrett takes this Kaili doll to the Bishop Museum where Curator Sumi (Ed Fernandez) says that it represents a god who could make himself heard over the sound of battle yelling "E ku kaili moku," "a rallying cry to unite for the common good, sort of 'long live Hawaii'." (This message was found on a piece of paper, also at the top of the chimney.)

The museum's resident ornithologist, a "Miss" Weston (Maura McGiveney) is annoyed that the feathers on this doll have been taken from the white tern, the "most ethereal of all our birds" which is almost extinct on Rabbit Island, with "only two nests left." (Things must have changed since the show was broadcast, because current information suggests this is no longer the case.) As she leaves, McGarrett leers at her, saying "One of these days, I might take up bird watching." She leers back at him, "When you do, let me know."

Another anti-pollution stunt follows shortly after, with an Oahu Refuse garbage truck dumping its load in front of the state Capitol building. This prompts McGarrett to visit the offices of the Environmental Defense League, an organization which has about 1,200 members. Its spokesman, Clyde Finley (Fred Ball), seems relatively mild-mannered, but he gets annoyed when McGarrett needles him. Finley utters the episode's title as he looks over the Honolulu skyline with its high rises and pollution.

The protests by the troublemaker environmentalist Kaili, now named after the doll, get more serious when a crop-dusting plane is shot down with the pilot receiving serious injuries, though the pilot later tells McGarrett that whoever did this took risks by removing him from the crashed plane.

Finley, who has already given McGarrett a list of his organization's members, shows up at the Five-O office with 57 more names of people who have attended the group's recent meetings. The Five-O team immediately start investigating them.

Among them is a Texaco gas station owner named Klosmosky (Herb Jeffries), in business since 1939, who has a Remington shotgun in his office, his "midnight survival kit." He rants, "What the Japs did to this place ain't nothin' to what the Haoles and Chinks are doin' to it since," complaining specifically about developer Lai Han: "He overdeveloped this land, overloaded the sewers, fouled the rivers. You take a dive in that stream back there, see what it does to your skin. Guys like Lai Han, they get over a sanitation code faster than you can flush a toilet." An employee at the gas station is played by Dennis Chun, Kam Fong's son (and Duke Lukela on the reincarnation of Five-O) in his first and uncredited role on the show.

Chin Ho visits a skinny university student named Joe Lemana (James Canada) who is doing a yoga headstand while sitar music plays. Lemana created a bunch of Kaili-related posters. As Chin leaves, Lemana calls him "badge man." Another suspect is a high school shop teacher and football coach Akua Nolo (Nephi Hanneman) who admits to sending letters and petitions to Congressmen about environmental issues. Kono tells him that "Kaili" had better turn himself in soon or he is going to see "a bunch of prison.” The publicity over the investigation brings a hippie nutbar named Kaili Kong (Don Lev) to the Five-O offices. Sporting a beard and wearing a robe, he wants to nominate McGarrett for "pig of the week." As he is escorted out, McGarrett tells Jenny this guy could use “a seven-day examination in the state rubber room."

McGarrett visits TV station KGMB, where a discussion about pollution between local bigwig developers and Senator Robert Patterson (Fred Titcomb) is underway. The Senator is making efforts to enact anti-pollution laws, but the developers throw typical "capitalist pig" arguments at him, most of which include the word "profits." Kaili, who, of course, is watching this show, puts the participants on a death list, with the result McGarrett puts them all under protective custody. Despite this, the slimy Lai Han (Richard Morrison), who McGarrett says has “syndicate connections,” is knocked off with his neck broken as he sleeps in his well guarded house, after the killer swims four miles through treacherous tides to access the place via the beach.

Lai is Asian, played in a mediocre fashion by Morrison, who was also in the previous ecological show "The Last Eden" as a white professor. In the next episode he plays the white warden of Oahu State Prison. In a meeting with the other developers in McGarrett's office, Lai wonders if Kaili would kill people "for ecology," describing this as "a most unlikely motive." I wonder if this the first time the word "ecology" was heard on TV!

Five-O determines that Nolo, the shop teacher, is most likely the environmental crusader, but lacking enough evidence, they convince Senator Patterson, who has been trying to persuade his colleagues in the government to back his efforts, to be the bait for a trap. The senator goes on TV and calls Kaili "the worst form of pollution" because his stunts, which have turned into attempted murder and murder, are causing people to turn "against us with a vengeance."

In a suspenseful finale, Five-O tails the senator out to the middle of nowhere where he is going to dedicate a new sugar plant. Predictably, Nolo/Kaili is waiting for him, and drives a huge truck in front of the senator's car, blocking him. When confronted by Five-O, Nolo flees into a nearby cane field. Despite Kono pleading with him in Hawaiian to give himself up, Nolo sets the field on fire, commiting suicide.

In this show, there is a nice balance between investigating inside and outside the Five-O office (the latter with those great non-process driving shots), topical subject matter, and a lot of local actors. There are no "featured players" in the end credits; all the names are in the smaller print usually reserved for the "supporting cast." And Kono gets plenty to do.

Unfortunately, there is a major issue with Hannemann being Kaili. While he is supposed to be an all-around athlete ("a real mountain ... a four letter man: football, wrestling, swimming, track") and has easy access to old typewriters in the high school basement which he can use to create his threatening letters, he is not some beefy guy who seems capable of hauling the heavy lid up to the top of the incinerator smokestack, which would require superhuman strength. Hopefully if the new Five-Zero remakes this show, they will get some guy like The Rock (or his body double, who has appeared on the show previously) to play Kaili, but I think even he would have trouble with the smokestack cover!

WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN?

Clyde Finley tells McGarrett as he looks out his office window at downtown Honolulu, "Look at this town. We have a scenic view of high-rises and traffic jams. We have the beginnings of Los Angeles smog and a New York indifference. Now, I ask you, is this any way to run a paradise?"

CASUALTY LIST:

MORE TRIVIA:

GALLERY:

Click on images below to see them large size. Use the back button in your browser to return to this page.

OR...

Click here for a slide show of all the large images.

Return to Quick Index


86. (S04E14) “Odd Man In” ★★

Original air date: 1/4/72-- Opening CreditsEnd Credits
Director: Paul Stanley; Producer: William Finnegan; Writer: E. Arthur Kean; Music: Stock
Timings: Teaser: 6:01; Main Titles: 0:58; Act One: 13:12; Act Two: 8:49; Act Three: 10:00; Act Four: 11:02; End Credits: 0:35; Total Time: 50:37.

QUICK PLOT:

Lewis Avery Filer from "Over Fifty? Steal!" escapes from prison after devising to steal $4 million from drug smugglers.

Click here to read Full Plot.

REVIEW:

This is a disappointing follow-up to S03E11, "Over Fifty? Steal!" — currently (2019) the highest-rated Classic Five-O episode on IMDb — with Hume Cronyn reprising his role as Lewis Avery Filer, master of disguise who, in the previous show, took revenge on those who had jerked him around. This episode was written by E. Arthur Kean, who did the previous one as well.

The opening sequence, where Filer escapes from Oahu State Prison, is stupid and illogical. In previous shows when we have seen this joint, it has seemed like a pretty serious place to be locked up in, but Filer makes it look like a joke.

Having replaced his body in bed with a dummy, Filer sneaks out of his cell around 2:00 AM, opening the door with a spoon which he has hidden in his shoe (seriously) and goes into a room nearby where he lights a candle with some matches, both of which he likely hid there previously. Nearby in the base of a red fire extinguisher is a crudely made rotary dial telephone with wires and alligator clips that Filer hooks up to a phone line nearby, knowing exactly which of multiple wires are the right ones, just like those movies where some geek always knows exactly which connection in a rat's nest of wires will be used to disable burglar alarms, elevators, etc.

We later learn that Filer became a telephone expert when Warden Challis (Richard Morrison, who appeared in the previous show as an Asian) gave him a training manual — Basic Telephone Circuitry — as part of his "rehabilitation program." Challis is obviously the opposite of the hard-as-nails warden represented in earlier shows by R.G. Armstrong.

Filer dials the prison switchboard using this phone and gets the guard for his cell block to be called away from his desk, during which Filer leaves the room and uses the spoon to get through another door and into another room which is opposite where the guard was sitting just as the guard returns.

From there, he hooks up the phone again to another set of wires and calls the telephone company pretending to be Challis, saying "We've got an emergency situation here and our lines are fouled." Filer is yelling this at the person on the other end — surely the guard who is sitting only feet away could hear him! Filer pulls wires out of the phone box on the wall in this room, cutting the connection to emphasize his request.

The telephone company sends someone to do the repair, and Filer sneaks out of the prison building. How he does this is not shown; he is first seen looking out through a barred window. He ends up sitting in the phone company truck outside wearing a hard hat and acting as if he has fallen asleep, waiting for a guard to clear him to get out of the yard. When the guard says "Be seeing you," Filer replies, "Don't count on it" as he drives away.

When he started his escape, Filer grabbed a picture off the wall in his cell of a guy named Elmo Zeigler, a Miami-based pal of Filer's (now former) roomate in Oahu named Grundy, stuffing it into the back of his pants. One wonders why the picture was on the wall in the first place — was Zeigler Grundy's boy friend? Zeigler is a well-known "troubleshooter" (sort of like Ray Donovan) who, "when the syndicate has a problem [would] solve it for them." It is interesting that McGarrett seems to know who Zeigler is. Zeigler supposedly died two years ago, but there are rumours that he faked his own death. In the picture that Filer stole, Zeigler looks exactly like Filer, with the addition of a moustache and a different hairdo. Duh, what a coincidence!

Perhaps because of some scuttlebutt that he picked up in jail, Filer goes to see local gangster Goro Shibata (Jiro Tamiya), pretending to be a guy named Lewis. He says Shibata's "new venture," which involves a shipment of $4 million worth of cocaine, "is in trouble." Shibata, thinking he knows who Lewis really is (i.e., Zeigler), checks with some guy he knows in Miami, who tells him that the circumstances surrounding Zeigler's death were fishy. Shibata quickly puts two and two together and concludes that the German-accented Filer is actually Zeigler. Filer tells Shibata, "McGarrett is laying for you, Goro. Be careful."

As soon as Filer leaves Shibata's office, he hurries to a nearby room in the same building like a janitor's closet where he has connected to the phone system and listens to Shibata talking via the marine operator to Moose Oakley (Lane Bradford) who is on the ship Starfish, floating off Oahu. Moose is supposed to deliver the cocaine, but Shibata tells him he will have to change his plans. No doubt Filer is able to listen in because of the lineman equipment, relays, handsets, etc. in the stolen phone truck. As McGarrett says: "A guy like Filer could set up his own phone company."

Using this information he overheard, Filer calls McGarrett and gives him very specific details as to where Oakley will be dropping off the cocaine that afternoon. When Five-O goes to this location, which is "east of Kaena Point on Route 93 ... just where the blacktop begins," they see Oakley arriving in a helicopter, which later dialogue suggests Oakley paid $50,000 to hire. Filer is nearby, having swum underwater from somewhere wearing a SCUBA outfit. Actor Cronyn, who was around 60 years old when this show was filmed, looks like this was not easy for him.

Shibata is in a black car close by and has sent his two "twin" bodyguards (Moe Keale and Daniel H. Awai, Jr.) in a purple car to get the dope. Filer, using a bullhorn which he has hidden in rocks near the shore, pretends to be McGarrett, saying "You are surrounded, come out with your hands up," which causes Oakley to quickly leave the scene, though you wonder how he would hear this command over the noise of the copter. Filer escapes back into the ocean and the twins are rounded up by Kono and Chin Ho, though they are soon sprung from jail with the help of Shibata's lawyers.

Filer as Zeigler is very clever — he set all this up so Shibata is then forced to get Oakley to come in on fixer "Zeigler's" own terms. Filer meets with the two men on a yacht which he has rented for only a couple of hours and outlines his plan. For his "services" bypassing Coast Guard, Customs, the Navy and the harbor master, he will receive a 25% commission on the value of the shipment, or one million dollars. Shibata and Oakley go along with him, because they figure after everything is concluded, they will kill him and no one will care, because Zeigler is already legally dead.

Shibata goes to the bank to get the money. Tailed by Five-O, he and the twins, following further instructions that Filer has left in a mailbox, end up in an apartment building in an elevator which Filer stops between floors. Shibata insists that "Zeigler knows what he is doing." However, Filer subjects the captive Shibata and twins to ultrasonic noise and forces them to hand over their guns and all the money. Where Filer got the ultrasonic noise generator is a good question. I doubt if this would have been something found in the telephone repairman's truck. This sequence is kind of dumb, since Filer, who is no longer disguised as Zeigler, can be seen through the door in the elevator ceiling, and they can hear him on the top of the car before he threatens them. There are opportunities to not only shoot Filer, but also to disable the device which is transmitting the sound. It is true that ultrasonic noise can kill you if the levels are set high enough and level four out of ten causes Shibata and the twins great pain.

Moose, who is pretending to take people out for a fishing charter, seems to be rounded up, since it is likely the fish contain the drugs. The show ends with Filer making a big boo-boo, because he was going to return money he "borrowed" from Warden Challis before escaping which was no doubt used to pay for things like renting the yacht. He was going to send the money by bonded messenger, of which there are only three on Oahu, and McGarrett obviously had a brainstorm about this. When McGarrett appears at Filer's door, his face is totally in shadow, which is gimmicky.

Unlike the previous show, where Cronyn's character had a certain charm and "cuteness," in this episode the operative word is just "clever" once you get past the stupidities of the escape from prison. The end of the show, where Filer plays a drunken old woman is actually pretty funny, though. Music by Morton Stevens from the previous Filer episode is reused throughout the show along with other stock tracks like the violin and marimba themes. Tamiya's voice is reportedly dubbed by Paul Frees. Despite this, it's too bad he couldn't have played an Asian instead of a white guy in some previous episode.

WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN?

The Free Dictionary defines "odd man out" as 1. Someone who is excluded from or left out of a group for some reason; or 2. Something or someone that is decidedly or markedly different, atypical, or unusual in comparison to others in a group. So presumably "odd man in" would be the opposite of this!

EPISODE PROMO:

Click here to see the promo. Use the back key in your browser to return to this screen.

CASUALTY LIST:

MORE TRIVIA:

GALLERY:

Click on images below to see them large size. Use the back button in your browser to return to this page.

OR...

Click here for a slide show of all the large images.

Return to Quick Index


87. (S04E15) “Bait Once, Bait Twice” ★★½  BOOK HIM, KONO   BOOK HIM 

Original air date: 1/11/72 — Opening CreditsEnd Credits
Director: Alf Kjellin; Producer: William Finnegan; Writers: Jerome Coopersmith (teleplay), Jerome Ross (story); Music: Don B. Ray
Timings: Teaser: 7:16; Main Titles: 0:58; Act One: 9:14; Act Two: 8:16; Act Three: 17:50; Act Four: 6:32; End Credits: 0:34; Total Time: 50:40.

QUICK PLOT:

A woman is forced to act like she is going to commit suicide so her fiancé in protective custody will come out of hiding and expose himself to assassination.

Click here to read Full Plot.

REVIEW:

This show is pretty good up to the last 6 minutes, when everything is resolved far too abruptly.

It opens with a professional hitman arriving at the Ilikai Hotel on a bicycle, suggesting again the show was ahead of its time in touching on ecological issues, just like in episodes S03E10, "The Last Eden" and the recently-seen S04E13, "Is This Any Way to Run a Paradise?" The name of the hitman, played by Ric Marlow, who co-wrote the muchly-recorded song "A Taste of Honey," is Johnny Froman, identified as "The Pro" in the credits. He locks his bicycle by putting a padlock on the chain. Froman goes to a room in the hotel which has been pre-booked and takes a long time to set up a tripod on which he mounts a high-powered rifle.

Across the way in another part of the Ilikai, a woman (Loretta Swit) comes out of her room on the 18th floor and stands precariously on the edge of the narrow ledge where there is no balcony. McGarrett just happens to be getting his haircut by a woman in a barber shop nearby, and he rushes up to what he assumes to be a jumper's room where he tries to talk her into coming inside. She ignores him. Danny Kamekona as psychiatrist Dr. Kamekona also appears, offering McGarrett some tips on how to win the woman's confidence.

From his vantage point, Froman gets the woman in the crosshairs of his rifle, then McGarrett. This is quite clever — we don't know who he has been sent to kill. Meanwhile, inside the woman's room, McGarrett, Kamekona and various cops all speak to each other sometimes very loudly and I'm sure the woman can hear them outside.

TV station KGMB sets up live coverage in front of the hotel within minutes hosted by Bob Sevey and he asks if anyone knows who the woman is. At the same time, local gambling kingpin Barry Bonamo (Malachi Throne) is watching this broadcast, making crass comments to his lawyer Bart Mariss (James Olson), like "That same girl could walk nude down Kalakaua Avenue, and hardly anyone would give her a second glance." Mariss is due shortly in court, and reminds Bonamo that in a couple of days he will have to deal with a "grisly spectacle" when a grand jury featuring a "strong and hostile witness" will be deciding Bonamo's fate.

While the woman's face as seen on TV from the angle viewed from the street is not what you would expect, some guy named Soong recognizes her and calls a special hotline which Five-O has set up at 277-2977. Danno goes to see Soong, making you wonder how many minutes this takes while the woman is freaking out everyone, still standing in the corner of the ledge outside the room. Soong says the woman and her fiancé came to his jewelry shop a couple of weeks ago to choose rings for their upcoming wedding. He gives Danno their names: Betty Landers (Swit) and Howard Miller (Norman DuPont).

Danno relays this information to McGarrett and in the next scene, after talking to Betty, who says that she won't come in unless Miller is brought to the room to talk to her, McGarrett leaves the hotel with Landers still on the ledge and Kamekona watching things. McGarrett goes to the company (identified as a "dress business") where Miller is the boss and Landers is the designer, which Betty presumably told him about. Like the jewellry store, is this other company also within a few blocks of the Ilikai?

McGarrett finds out that Miller hasn't been in the office for 5 days, but has recently been in touch with District Attorney John Manicote (Glenn Cannon, in his first of 29 appearances in this role). Miller is being held in isolation at HPD headquarters, because he is the "strong and hostile witness" in the case against Bonamo.

McGarrett makes a huge blunder that you can see coming a mile away, taking Miller out of custody over Manicote's strong objection that going to the hotel could be "very dangerous." McGarrett stupidly tells Manicote while Miller is standing right next to them, "Hold me responsible ... unless Mr. Miller doesn't give a damn about what happens to his girl, in which case, he can just sit here, nice and secure." Very un-McGarrett-like!

Under guard, Miller is driven to the hotel room where he tearfully tells Landers he loves her and will explain everything, like why he has been missing in action for the last few days. She is edging her way back along the ledge towards the room when Froman shoots Miller dead as he appears in the window to grab Betty's hand. Miller plunges 18 stories as Betty screams.

Later at the DA's office, Manicote tells McGarrett, "A year and a half of hard work got shot down with [Miller]. A year and a half of trying to get that guy Bonamo." McGarrett has been coming forth with a lot of cover-your-ass lines since Miller's death, finally telling Manicote, "I'll give you Barry Bonamo. On a plate. But not for gambling. Murder. Murder one."

McGarrett goes to see Betty, who has been taken to "Keiser's Hospital" (according to the subtitles, more likely one run by the Kaiser organization) and is under guard. McGarrett, not knowing what is going on, accuses Betty of being "an accessory to murder"! She tells him that her five-year-old daughter Suzie was kidnapped, forcing her into the elaborate ruse to act as bait to spring Miller from jail and have him brought to the hotel because someone "just wanted to talk to him."

Back at his waterfront estate, Bonamo is getting a massage from a couple of bimbos when he is interrupted by Mariss, who relays the message that the grand jury hearing has been cancelled because of Miller's death. Bonamo tells Mariss he is "truly sorry he's dead" and that "[Miller] was worth more to me alive," because he had run up a huge amount of gambling debts which he had made an arrangement to pay off. Mariss becomes agitated because he knows McGarrett is "on the warpath" for his boss's hide, but Bonamo swears to Mariss that "as heaven is my witness," he had nothing to do with Miller's murder.

Shortly after this, a car is dredged out of the ocean which contains not only Froman's body, but also a substantial amount of cash. Based on these two things, McGarrett orders Bonamo to be brought to the Five-O offices. He soon arrives there, accompanied by Mariss who complains about the "manhandling" of his client. Bonamo, on the other hand, doesn't seem too worried. McGarrett presents evidence for what should be an open and shut case:

McGarrett orders Bonamo to be booked, but Bonamo protests, saying "I didn't do it. It's a frame." Mariss is so annoyed about being deceived by his client that he makes a big deal out of resigning on the spot and tells Bonamo to "get a new lawyer." Bonamo tries to make McGarrett believe that he had no motive for killing Miller, since Miller was paying off his debt, but McGarrett refuses to believe this. Bonamo tells McGarrett "if there's one guy in this town who should know a frame when he sees it, it's you," but McGarrett is disgusted, and says "Book him" again.

However, after Bonamo leaves, there is a disgreement between Chin Ho, who says of Bonamo "what an actor" who should "play King Lear," and Danno, who says "What if he's not acting? The evidence. It's almost too good. Mostly, if Bonamo wanted to hit the hit man, why would he plant $10,000 on him with his fingerprints all over it?" McGarrett stares philosophically out the window.

The next scene has Bonamo, now in jail, calling Mariss about a hand-delivered letter with proof that he had no motif to kill Froman. Bariss tells Bonamo to give this to his next attorney, but eventually relents and picks up the letter.

The next scene shows Mariss showing up at Betty Landers' place, also a very nice house which is on the edge of the ocean above some cliffs. Betty tells Marliss that she has access to a document that can exonerate Bonamo — Miller's will, wherein Miller "signed over a quarter ownership of his company to Barry Bonamo," presumably to pay off his further debts, with a clause in it, that on Howard's death, Barry Bonamo's percentage goes down from 25 to 5." (This does not make sense, because then there is no way that Bonamo would get 25%. There is no provision mentioned that would invalidate the first condition if Miller didn't die of natural causes, for example, he was murdered, and then Bonamo would get less.)

When Mariss wonders why Betty wants to exonerate Bonamo, she tells him to "Think of me as a poor widow. And I'm not even that. I'm left bereaved and with no security. I could bear up much better with $200,000. In cash, of course." (Also makes no sense, if she is so poor, why is she living in such a fancy house?)

She continues: "Mr. Mariss, I've been through hell. Somebody's gonna pay for that. Lost the man I love, my child was kidnapped and her life threatened. I was terrified out of my mind."

Mariss replies, "What are you crying about? Your child was returned safe, unhurt." (This is the first we have heard of this.) Betty suddenly realizes that Mariss is the one who was the mastermind behind everything: "It was you. You called me. You kidnapped Susan. It was you. You had Howard murdered."

For a lawyer, Mariss suddenly acts pretty stupid, looking like a kid caught with his finger in the cookie jar, saying, "Incredible. The best frame in the world. Barry's half million a year. It would have been mine. I blew it."

Mariss attempts to throw Betty over the railing of her balcony to the rocks below, but, of course, McGarrett and Danno are nearby and stop this. Whether they heard everything and are going to be able to make a case against Mariss is yet another good question, along with whether McGarrett, Betty or Bonamo himself were the ones who dreamt up this instance of "second bait."

WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN?

Bait once = the scam with Betty on the ledge; Bait twice = the scam where Betty exposes Mariss as the villain of the piece.

EPISODE PROMO:

Click here to see the promo. Use the back key in your browser to return to this screen.

CASUALTY LIST:

MORE TRIVIA:

GALLERY:

Click on images below to see them large size. Use the back button in your browser to return to this page.

OR...

Click here for a slide show of all the large images.

Return to Quick Index


88 & 89. (S04E16 & S04E17) “The Ninety-Second War,” Part I ★★½ & Part II ★★

PART ONE:
Original air date: 1/18/72 — Opening CreditsEnd Credits
Director: Bob Sweeney; Producer: William Finnegan; Writers: John D.F. Black (teleplay), Leonard Freeman (story); Music: Morton Stevens
Timings: Teaser: 5:30; Main Titles: 0:58; Act One: 16:47; Act Two: 9:35; Act Three: 9:16; Act Four: 8:01; End Credits: 0:35; Total Time: 50:42.

PART TWO:
Original air date: 1/25/72 — Opening CreditsEnd Credits
Director: Bob Sweeney; Producer: William Finnegan; Writers: John D.F. Black (teleplay), Leonard Freeman (story); Music: Morton Stevens
Timings: Teaser: 6:24; Main Titles: 0:59; Act One: 8:53; Act Two: 10:24; Act Three: 12:22; Act Four: 11:05; End Credits: 0:35; Total Time: 50:42.

QUICK PLOT:

McGarrett is framed as a thief by Wo Fat, who needs 90 seconds to carry out a plot against a U.S. missile tracking base.

Click here to read Full Plot.

REVIEW:

This two-part episode begins with the workaholic McGarrett leaving his office around midnight. A few hours later, he is found, seemingly seriously injured, in a flipped-upside-down white car. Beside him is the dead gangster Benny Jalor and an attaché case full of money.

The car is righted by a tow truck and the Honolulu fire department. The manner in which this is done is brutal, with little concern as to whether McGarrett has any spinal injuries (he does not, but we don't find this out until later). It would make more sense if the tow truck people had chains on both sides of the car to turn it over slowly. I'm surprised that they don't use the Jaws of Life, used to extract people from crashed cars, which was first used around 10 years before this show was filmed. The firemen are seen using a heavy-duty carborundum saw to cut through the roof of the righted car.

Unresponsive to feeling in most of his body, McGarrett is rushed to the hospital in a Physicians Ambulance which turns into a City and County Ambulance as it is seen travelling down a Honolulu street. McGarrett undergoes a barrage of tests, but nothing is found which is causing his paralysis and he soon recovers and is back on the job.

In the attaché case along with $20,000 there is a book with codes. They turn out to be connected to a Swiss bank account, number 550-Z-695, which contains $2.2 million dollars. McGarrett soon figures out this is all an elaborate — perhaps a bit too elaborate — frame designed to disgrace him which has been set up over the last three years, and only one man has the capability of orchestrating such a scheme: Wo Fat.

Shortly after this, McGarrett leaves town, supposedly having been relieved of his duties by the Governor and pending an investigation. Grilled by the local press as he is boarding a plane on his way to Geneva with a one-way ticket as to whether he will be charged with an offense and extradited back to Hawaii, McGarrett tells them, "I know how it works. Before they can touch me, they've gotta take their evidence before the grand jury. By that time, I'll be in Switzerland. [L]et me put it this way, gentlemen. Millionaires have a way of avoiding such discomforts."

Wo Fat watches McGarrett on TV as he is harangued by the reporters, but you have to wonder if this scenario is something that Wo expected, that McGarrett's greed for the $2.2 million would overcome his loyalty to the State of Hawaii. McGarrett leaving town has actually been planned in cahoots with the Governor, with the intention of doing something "unexpected" to throw Wo Fat off base. But Wo doesn't seem to be disturbed about this at all, though he sends his "main man" Chow Lee (Robert ("Bob") Nelson) on the same plane as McGarrett to make sure he gets off in Los Angeles and then boards a plane for Switzerland.

In Geneva, it seems that McGarrett picks up the $2.2 million in the bank account, but this is really a double for him, a British spy named Luther Holbrook (Jack Lord, voiced by Paul Frees) who is literally a "double agent." McGarrett arrives at the bank just as Holbrook is leaving. Holbrook tries to run away and is shot by a security guard.

Holbrook's girlfriend Claudine (Dana Wynter) is tracked down and brought to the hospital where he has been taken and is in bad shape. She tells McGarrett she knows how Holbrook was connected to Wo Fat, how he had plastic surgery to resemble the Five-O boss, learned to duplicate his handwriting, and then deposited the money in the Swiss bank pretending to be McGarrett.

Holbrook then went into hiding to avoid an assassination attempt by some killers who were hired by Wo. Hearing or knowing that McGarrett would come to pick up the money, Holbrook then went to the bank to withdraw the funds which were on deposit there.

The production values of part one of the show are high, especially the beginning eleven minutes with its night time photography, which is where the shot of Danno looking through the broken car window from the main titles comes from.

The procedure in the hospital, giving McGarrett a spinal tap and other tests, is very elaborate. Considering there is ultimately little wrong with him, it is determined that he was given some kind of drug to knock him out and make him seem paralyzed.

But how did the people who staged the accident know that McGarrett would survive to the extent that he did and Jalor would die, other than putting a seat belt on McGarrett and not one on Jalor?

Later on, the whole frame-up with Holbrook seems far too complicated. The gorgeous Wynter shows up with only about five minutes left in the show, and the information she reveals about her boyfriend is very sketchy.

We are left with a lot of questions after Claudine's appearance. In fact, after Holbrook passes away, she just walks out of the hospital room past Albrecht and others, which seems very peculiar in light of the information which she possesses. Some of the unresolved issues are:

The second part of this show drops in quality somewhat, with everything being really dragged out. This two-part episode would probably have been better as a one-hour or 90-minute show.

Washington bigshot Jonathan Kaye (Tim O'Connor), having arrived to take charge of things, sternly barks a lot of questions and orders and there is a largely unnecessary reappearance by Soviet Colonel Mischa Toptegan (Roger C. Carmel, see S03E18 & S03E19), who is now buddy-buddy with the Americans and allowed access to a lot of things that one would suspect are top secret. Toptegan is there because the Soviet missile defense system experienced some anomaly a couple of weeks before, relating to Chinese missile launching. Recently there was also a 5-second blackout at the American missile tracking center, reportedly caused by "a simple circuitry problem."

This second part of the show is very claustrophobic, taking place mostly indoors — only 3:22 is outside. Much of it is in a fictional military bunker under Diamond Head Crater, and there are several shots of people going into and out of an elevator with automatic doors where people-movers like golf carts are parked. This becomes almost comical.

There is a meeting of various national security bigwigs at the beginning of the show:

LEFT SIDE: RIGHT SIDE:

The meaning of the title's "90 seconds" is finally explained. As Holbrook lay shot on the stretcher in the bank lobby in Geneva, he told McGarrett "Wo Fat bought my soul for 90 seconds." It refers to the time during which a missile tracking system based in Hawaii will be disabled by Wo Fat to allow the Chinese to test-fire an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of carrying a nuclear device without being detected by the Americans.

The man in charge of turning off the system is the man who designed it, Hans Vogler (Donald Pleasance), an ex-German scientist who was captured and brainwashed by the Russians after World War II. He is now the chief of the American missile tracking operation. Vogler is under the thumb of Wo Fat, who tortured his asthmatic daughter Lisa with pollen when he was working at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico and then got him sent to the Pacific Missile Tracking Center in Hawaii. More recently, Vogler's daughter has been kidnapped to get Vogler to co-operate.

The complexity of the elaborate frame-up of McGarrett seen in part one and abuse of Vogler's daughter really turns into a whole lot of nothing (or a whole lot of 90 seconds). There is little suspense in the show, other than near the very end.

McGarrett attempts to pick Vogler's brains, telling the scientist that his daughter's asthma attack at White Sands was induced by pollen placed in the air conditioning system of his home, which McGarrett was told earlier by a Dr. Kingsby (Dick Faun) from White Sands, who seems to have been brought to the Diamond Head base very quickly. Vogler freaks out, saying he would never do such a thing, and collapses.

Following this, Vogler, who has been taken to a hospital bed and is in a catatonic state, is injected with some drug like sodium pentothal. McGarrett, acting on Kaye's orders, continues his questions, which are recorded with a Sony TC-120 cassette machine with the name "Sony" taped over. McGarrett determines that Vogler is a double agent who says that Wo Fat, who he calls "a devil," threatened to kill him and his daughter, making it look like he committed suicide if he didn't co-operate.

Kaye wants Vogler to carry out Wo's plan to create the "90-second gap," which will be accomplished by plugging a couple of cards into expansion slots in the missile tracking center's computer. Despite his mental state, arrangements are made for Vogler to go and see Wo who agrees to delay the time for the operation, originally slated for noon, to 2 p.m. Meanwhile, Kaye arranges with Cape Kennedy to launch a satellite which will keep track of the Chinese missile while Wo thinks that the Americans are oblivious to what is going on.

Everything is accomplished with split-second precision, though Vogler gets too apprehensive and almost plugs the cards into the computer early, which is stopped when Danno, who is assigned to keep an eye on him, puts a gun to Vogler's head.

Kaye's attitude that it is worth sacrificing Vogler's daughter to save thousands of other children is very similar to a third season episode of the new Five-O where some CIA type says that avoiding an attack on San Francisco is more important than saving the life of the son of a terrorist who is responsible for the attack.

Maybe the writers for the new show got some of their inspiration from this episode, along with the lack of plot logic typical of many of the new show's episodes? As it is, the overall story for "The Ninety-Second War" is kind of disappointing, especially since it originated with series' creator and producer Leonard Freeman himself!

CASUALTY LIST:

MORE TRIVIA:

VARIATIONS:

In September 2023, I found some old VHS tapes which had 2-part episodes which had been combined into 2-hour shows and shown on TBS Superstation, probably in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Research in the CBS "Bible" for the show suggests that two-hour versions of the two-part shows prepared by CBS themselves were available to TV stations.

There are some differences when these two-hour versions are compared to the original broadcasts.

BROADCAST VERSION (FROM PARAMOUNT DVDS):

Part One of the Broadcast Version starts with an 8-second "Wave," after which McGarrett is seen working in the Five-O office around midnight. He leaves, then about three hours later, there are sirens, cop cars and an overturned vehicle on a Honolulu street. Duke finds gangster Benny Jalor dead in the vehicle along with McGarrett, who is still alive. There is a lot of blood everywhere.

Fire truck R2, a Physicians Ambulance and Danno show up. There is presumably a gap between this and what happened in the previous sentences, otherwise how did Danno know about these happenings? Danno speaks to McGarrett, then to Duke and a fireman. After turning the car over, they will have to cut him out using the "carborundum saw," which can slice through metal.

Danno tells reporters to get lost, then talks again to McGarrett, who says, "What the hell happened? I can't feel anything." Danno tells him they will have to turn the car over (!!). The time is now 3:20 a.m. McGarrett tells Danno twice he was in the office at midnight.

This leads to the Main Title at 5:29, ending at 6:27. The show's credits for Part I start at 6:31, ending at 7:29 with "Directed by Bob Sweeney" as the car is being turned over.

Part One of the Broadcast Version ends with Claudine, the girlfriend of Holbrook, McGarrett's fatally wounded double, leaving Holbrook's hospital room at 49:34. After this, Interpol boss Karl Albrecht goes into the room and says to McGarrett "Finished?"; McGarrett says, "Just beginning…" The music swells, McGarrett also leaves, heading towards the end credit "Executive Producer Leonard Freeman" at 50:04. You can see this sequence here.

Part 2 of the Broadcast Version then has a lengthy (6:24 including "Wave") previously-on teaser.

This teaser, which is edited from what has been seen in Part One, contains the following.

This previously-on teaser is followed by the Main Titles and then credits for the second part at 7:23, starting with the episode title at 7:29 Part II and ending at 8:28 with "Directed by Bob Sweeney" as limos head to Diamond Head Crater where Jonathan Kaye and the Governor are met by a helicopter carrying McGarrett. The story continues at a top-secret meeting in the Diamond Head Crater military complex.

TWO-HOUR VERSION ("TBS")

(Times are approximate based on VHS tape from which commercials were removed and was converted to an MP4 file. This show may be time-compressed.)

The TBS two-hour version starts with a 4:58 teaser which uses material from the previously-on teaser at the beginning of the second part of the broadcast version discussed above. However, it only uses material up to 3:18 of this teaser.

By putting this new teaser at the beginning of the entire 2-hour version, it gives away major plot points, and to fill the remaining time, it includes several scenes which are actually after the point where the Part 2 previously-on teaser ended with Holbrook's comment about Wo Fat. (None of the encounter between McGarrett and Holbrook's girlfriend Claudine from Part One is included in that previously-on Part Two teaser.)

To avoid seeing the credits at the end of the now-combined original part 1 and beginning of original part 2, they are edited out in a clever way in the 2-hour version, as you can see here. The main title of the show for parts one and two was also replaced.

GALLERY:

Click on images below to see them large size. Use the back button in your browser to return to this page.

OR...

Click here for a slide show of all the large images.

Return to Quick Index


90. (S04E18) “Skinhead” ★★★★  BOOK HIM 

Original air date: 2/1/72 — Opening CreditsEnd Credits
Director: Allen Reisner; Producer: William Finnegan; Writers: Alvin Sapinsley (teleplay), Will Lorin (story); Music: Stock
Timings: Teaser: 5:45; Main Titles: 0:58; Act One: 10:06; Act Two: 11:47; Act Three: 8:45; Act Four: 12:16; End Credits: 0:34; Total Time: 50:11.

QUICK PLOT:

After a young woman is raped and a soldier is arrested and tried for the crime, McGarrett begins to suspect the soldier didn't do it.

Click here to read Full Plot.

REVIEW:

This episode, written by Alvin Sapinsley, who had already penned the nasty "A Matter Of Mutual Concern," seen earlier this season, deals with very touchy issues: rape, racism and sexism, the last particularly of a judicial nature. Sapinsley went on to write the Vashon Trilogy and its sequel, as well as "One Big Happy Family," among others.

The protagonist of Skinhead is the 6′6″ tall Lee Paul, who appeared in S01E21, "Not That Much Different" as a peacenik. Here he is army corporal Mitch Kenner, who hangs out at the Seacomber Tavern along with a lot of other military men. Crappy rock music is heard blaring out of a juke box as the camera zooms in and out, focusing on the asses of women in shorts who are dancing.

Kenner is chug-a-lugging a stein of beer along with a hard liquor chaser. Some guy named Luke Leonard (Murray MacLeod) tries to befriend him and is told to "get lost." Nora Kayama (Miko Mayama) shows up at the bar, expecting to find her boyfriend, who is not there. Kenner comes over and starts to feel her up. After she takes a call from her boyfriend, who is late, Kenner blocks her way, asking "What's the matter, kid? White meat too rich for your blood?" She belts him in the face with her purse, and he calls her "a lousy gook broad," grabbing her by the throat. Luke tries to intervene, but is pushed to the floor as the bartender (Kimo Kahoano, uncredited, his first Five-O appearance) and the bar owner (Robert Luck) look on. Nora runs out of the place into the parking lot, pursued by Kenner, who rips open her blouse and knocks her to the ground. From the door of the bar, Luke looks on as the camera continues zooming in and out on women's bums.

The next day, McGarrett and Danno are at the hospital. We learn that "This is the fourth case in six weeks." According to Dr. Yamato (Winston Char), Nora was "beaten severely, mostly about the upper body" and definitely raped. When McGarrett asks her, "Did you resist him? Did you fight?" she shows him her bruised hands with at least one broken fingernail.

There are lots of other bits of evidence gathered from the scene near the bar: footprints (size 13D), strands of blonde chest hair and flesh samples from the rapist's chest, grass and shrubbery samples and fragments of fabric from a sports shirt. McGarrett is incensed, saying, "I want him. I want this guy. I've heard a hundred different reasons for murder, but when a man beats a girl like that and rapes her, there's only one reason. He's turned animal. He's gone rabid. Now, we're dealing with a mad dog, and I wanna nail him and put him away before he attacks somebody else."

Acting on a suspicion that a "skinhead" is likely in the military, several bald guys at the local army base are put on parade for Five-O. Kenner tries to brush off scratches on his chest, saying he fell "smack into" a hedge, and has an alibi from another soldier to prove this. Nora identifies Kenner from a lineup as does the bartender and Kenner is booked. However, Assistant District Attorney Manicote is hesitant to go to court because the bartender's statement conflicts with of the bar owner, who "says it never happened. He didn't see the skinhead, he didn't see the girl, he didn't see the customer, he didn't see anything." Manicote says "We have to prove criminal assault ... and I need that other customer [meaning Luke] to do it. You find me that other customer and I'll hand you the conviction on a tray."

McGarrett goes to see the owner, who continues to deny he saw anything; in fact, he fired the bartender, who he accused of drinking on the job. McGarrett is fed up, saying "I'm gonna put a man in here starting tonight and every night, and he's gonna be waiting and watching. And the minute one beer goes across this bar to somebody who is one day underage, the minute some pothead lights up a joint in the can, or the minute there is one fight or some drunk gets served a drink when he should have been sent home: There goes your license." Suddenly the owner recovers his memory, even to the extent of identifying Luke by the name "Chris" on his shirt.

"Chris" is tracked down to Big Harry's Fill Her Up, a gas station near the bar, but Chris Chase (Dean Altier), who is only seventeen and a half, says he has never been in the bar. Instead, he says that Luke borrowed a clean shirt from him the night of the rape because Luke's own shirt was dirty.

In an arraignment with Judge B.K. Kalehei (Yankee Chang, giving an excellent performance), Kenner has Arthur Tosaki (Kwan Hi Lim) appointed as his attorney and chooses to be tried without a jury. In the hall after bail is set at $10,000, Kenner taunts McGarrett, saying, "Do I look like the kind of guy that has to knock a chick down to get her attention? Man, I gotta fight them off … Anyway, what are you so upset about? I mean, she's not even white." This causes Kono to totally fly off the handle, attacking Kenner, and McGarrett has to restrain him.

On his way out of the building, Kenner sees Luke talking to McGarrett, and tells Tosaki that Luke can "alibi" him: "He was at that place that night. We had a beer together. He knows what happened. you find out who he is. And where he lives." Once he finds out Luke's address, Kenner goes there and threatens to kill Luke if he doesn't testify in court exactly what Kenner wants him to. (What is said is actually not heard.)

During the trial, Tosaki uses very oily arguments despite evidence that Nora was brutally raped, suggesting that she "somehow managed to alter the sequence of events." Tosaki brings up the fact that Nora had sex with other men before the rape, including with her boyfriend, who is present in the courtroom (along with Nora's parents!). The judge cautions Tosaki that he can proceed with this line of inquiry, but he is "on thin ice."

Tosaki's further questions verge on the offensive, basically suggesting that Nora was promiscuous: "You insist that this act of intimacy, which in the past has occurred apparently voluntarily with a few different young men, in this particular case occurred forcibly, against your will, and only after you had been rendered insensible? Why were you so particular in this instance, Miss Kayama?"

Luke is next on the stand, saying that he witnessed Kenner getting "interested" in Nora. But suddenly Five-O gets a call from Luke's apartment manager, saying that Kenner visited Luke the day after the arraignment. Kenner and Tosaki look very nervous while McGarrett is telling this to Manicote during a brief pause in the trial. Confronted with this admission, Luke spills the beans about Kenner's visit. After this, Kenner tells Tosaki, "He just buried me, didn't he?" and Tosaki replies, "No, you just buried yourself."

However, the show is not over yet — there are still about 12 minutes to go!

Although Kenner is convicted, and is out on bail pending appeal, McGarrett says that he is "getting some strange vibes," and that Luke is a "weasel" who "gave testimony that he knew would hang Kenner." As one might expect, Kenner is not going after Luke, but "at Schofield [he] is calm and smirking, acting like he just won the pushup contest at Muscle Beach." Five-O investigates Kenner's background and discovers an 18-month period between his service in Vietnam where he was decorated and discharged in California, March 24th, 1969.and when he re-enlisted in the army September 19th, 1970.

A look at Kenner's bank account records shows Kenner sends $50 a month to a Canadian doctor named Thomas Camden-Smith, a urologist who operated on Kenner after a serious car accident in August, 1969 where "perineal nerve damage" and a rupture to Kenner's posterior urethra resulted in Kenner becoming "totally and permanently" impotent. Five-O psychs out Luke, who burned the shirt he wore while he was raping Nora, when they find three buttons from the gas station shirt that Luke burned in ashes from the incinerator at Luke's place and confront him with this with the help of an additional button which was not from the incinerator at all. Luke tries to escape from the Five-O offices but ends up on the floor sobbing.

The charges against Kenner for rape will be dropped, but instead he will re-indicted on a lesser charge of aggravated assault. When McGarrett asks Kenner why he would risk going to jail for 25 years if he had killed Luke for testifying against him, he says, "What's 25 years? I'd risk 50 years to keep the guys in the outfit from finding out that I ... I wasn't a man anymore."

McGarrett tells him, "A man? Do you know the meaning of that word? You haven't got a clue, have you? You don't have a clue."

The acting in this episode is of a very high caliber. Lee Paul (who passed away in 2019) is smug and arrogant, yet pouty when he realizes that the jig is up during the trial. You have to wonder if there were complaints received from the military as to how soldiers were depicted in a bad light by Paul's portrayal of Kenner, but I have never heard anything to this effect. I find McGarrett's quasi-brainstorm that "something is wrong" after Luke's courtroom admission about being threatened a bit hard to take; McGarrett snaps his fingers six times while thinking. It is also very odd that Chris, the guy whose shirt Luke borrowed, and who supplied Five-O with the fourth button, is seemingly standing in the front office as Luke is escorted out. Wouldn't Luke have seen Chris?

At the end of the show the "military theme" plays in the background as McGarrett tells Kenner what he thinks of him. The framing of Kenner at the show's end is interesting, with him first sitting in a chair and then standing and walking towards the camera. The score is stock; the violin theme is heard when Luke first meets Five-O at the courthouse.

EPISODE PROMO:

Click here to see the promo. Use the back key in your browser to return to this screen.

CASUALTY LIST:

MORE TRIVIA:

GALLERY:

Click on images below to see them large size. Use the back button in your browser to return to this page.

OR...

Click here for a slide show of all the large images.

Return to Quick Index


91. (S04E19) “While You're At It, Bring In The Moon” ★★½

Original air date: 2/8/72 — Opening CreditsEnd Credits
Director: Michael O'Herlihy; Producer: William Finnegan; Writer: E. Arthur Kean; Music: Stock
Timings: Teaser: 6:05; Main Titles: 0:58; Act One: 11:34; Act Two: 10:31; Act Three: 9:38; Act Four: 10:51; End Credits: 0:33; Total Time: 50:10.

QUICK PLOT:

An eccentric billionaire suspected of killing one of his business associates is afraid to leave his antiseptic yacht and clear himself of the crime.

Click here to read Full Plot.

REVIEW:

On his way with Danno and Chin Ho to investigate a murder at the estate of Morgan Hilliard (Barry Sullivan), McGarrett is kidnapped by six of Hilliard's men and taken to a yacht off Oahu to meet the eccentric billionaire.

Hilliard is obviously based on Howard Hughes. He has an "aversion to human contact" and is totally paranoid about germs. When McGarrett arrives at the yacht, he has to pass through a spray which is a "decontamination procedure." He says "What the hell is that?" The pill-popping Hilliard is also "in touch with cosmic forces" like auras. He is seen using some gizmo on his arm which "draws the harmful energy from your body and enforces the good."

Of course, McGarrett is annoyed at being summoned in this manner and tells Hilliard so. But Hilliard says that the reason he is floating on the ocean is because back at his place, three of his associates were trying to frame him for the murder of a fourth, Dewey Felton, who he had just fired, and were conspiring to create a case to take him to court on grounds of emotional instability. He calls these men "Judases" because he was offering them 49 percent of a steam car he was developing, but they are primarily interested in the court battle over his empire which has two and a half billion dollars at stake. McGarrett describes this as a "good motive for murder."

With the help of Che Fong, Five-O comes up with a scenario which had Hilliard shoot at the three men, killing Felton, after they presented him with a summons. Hilliard subsequently fled from the scene to the safety of the harbor. However, the descriptions of the associates – Byers (Ed Flanders), Otis Mims (H.M. Wynant) and Victor Tabernash (Milton Selzer) – as to what happened with the shooting are very sketchy, like whether they saw Hilliard actually fire the gun, considering he had just gone into a sauna with ultraviolet lights and antiseptic sprays where it was impossible to see inside because of fog-like mist. There are also questions arising from a reel-to-reel tape recording which was being made of the four men's meeting with Hilliard as well.

McGarrett manages to convince Mims and Tabernash to undergo a polygraph, not to be used in court, but just to satisfy his curiosity. Mims looks like he passes it, but Tabernash is so nervous, the needles are flying all over the place. Byers refuses to take the test, but admits, "I was wrong about Hilliard. I didn't see a gun in his hand, or anything else. Perhaps I just wanted to see one."

The local press has a field day with Five-O's seeming ineptness at solving the case, which McGarrett says "looks great in the paper but flops in court." A large crowd of reporters follows McGarrett around everywhere and articles in the local papers have headlines like "McGarrett Misses Key Investigation – WHY?" There are even suggestions from the press that McGarrett meeting Hilliard on the yacht was to discuss a deal with McGarrett becoming the next Governor of Hawaii.

Over Hilliard's objections, McGarrett manages to convince him to return to the scene of the crime, where he and the associates try to recreate what happened. Hilliard agrees with McGarrett that there is something peculiar about the first of the seven shots that were fired and recorded on the tape. The first bullet is subsequently dug out of the roof above the sauna, whereas the other six were all recovered earlier from around the swimming pool where the confrontation took place. McGarrett and Danno work backwards to find a place near the estate where it looks like a long-distance rifle was used in the shooting.

McGarrett suddenly has a brainstorm that whoever is involved with the shooting is an "engineer." This description apparently fits Byers, though we have never been told that up to this point. With "six phone calls and some international police work" highly reminiscent of the Five-O reboot, McGarrett learns that the rifle involved in the shooting was delivered to Byers two months before after he sent $200,000 from a Swiss bank account to a German arms company specializing in custom-made weapons which can shoot a .45 slug "at least 250 yards with absolute accuracy."

McGarrett goes to visit Byers, and as he sits down to talk to him, Byers tells him that the rifle, which is nearby, is aimed at McGarrett's head, and can be fired using the remote control which Byers has in his hand. A tense staring contest between the two men goes on for several seconds, but when Byers is distracted by an approaching helicopter which will take him to the airport to escape the islands, McGarrett leaps forward and overpowers him.

On a basic level, this episode makes sense, but there are a lot of questions regarding Byers and his motivation which are left unanswered. There is snappy dialogue between McGarrett and Hilliard, though the billionaire could have been made even more wacky.

EPISODE PROMO:

Click here to see the promo. Use the back key in your browser to return to this screen.

CASUALTY LIST:

MORE TRIVIA:

GALLERY:

Click on images below to see them large size. Use the back button in your browser to return to this page.

OR...

Click here for a slide show of all the large images.

Return to Quick Index


92. (S04E20) “Cloth Of Gold” ★★★½

Original air date: 2/15/72 — Opening CreditsEnd Credits
Director: Michael O'Herlihy; Producer: William Finnegan; Writer: Bennett Foster; Music: Don B. Ray
Timings: Teaser: 4:22; Main Titles: 0:58; Act One: 8:59; Act Two: 13:48; Act Three: 11:26; Act Four: 10:33; End Credits: 0:35; Total Time: 50:41.

QUICK PLOT:

Members of a crooked real estate company become victims of poison from a rare shellfish.

Click here to read Full Plot.

REVIEW:

In this very Hawaiian episode, three wheeler-dealer real estate salesmen, partners in Hawaiian Palm Estates, all die horrible, mysterious deaths. The "weapon" turns out to be a venomous species of sea snail with the same name as the show's title.

The first to go is Ralph Mingo during his birthday party in the teaser, which is taking place at the oft-used location, the Anderson Estate. Mingo is played by Jay Robinson, who portrayed the emperor Caligula in the 1950s films The Robe and Demetrius and the Gladiators in a histrionically swishy fashion. Considering he is only on screen for just over three minutes, Robinson makes the most of his brief part, collapsing and dying while making horrible choking sounds.

When Five-O shows up to investigate Mingo's death, Danno describes the attendees at the party to McGarrett as "con men, grifters, pimps, assorted playmates." McGarrett gets no co-operation from the crowd and a bunch of mouth from Mingo's surviving partners, the arrogant stud Fred Akamai Loy (Ray Danton) and the shifty Wallis (Jason Evers) when he asks them "Who gets Mingo's piece of your real estate shill game?" McGarrett says that people were "swindled" by the threesome's sale of "phony real estate lots" like "a quarter acre of lava rock."

When Danno looks around the house, he is curious as to why there is a video recorder and camera in a bedroom. Wallis describes this equipment as a "sales tool," eventually being truthful when he says, "It's like sports … some like to play and some like to watch." The recorder was used by Mingo, who was "kind of like a spectator, if you know what I mean." When Wallis asks Danno if he would like to see "some really beautiful scenery," he hesitates, saying, "You'd probably have me pinched for pornography."

Doc Bergman has to work hard to determine the cause of death. All he originally manages to determine is that whatever killed Mingo was an "ammonium compound" of some kind. Danno and Kono later get some big clues regarding the Cloth of Gold at Sea Life Park from Dr. Pell (John Hunt), who tells them that it injects poison through needles which are "only five-one-thousandths of an inch in diameter."

At the three salesmen's house during the investigation, Kono keeps staring at a tank containing a Cloth of Gold as well as some fish which it has killed. Danno asks him if there is some "deep Hawaiian symbolism" involved. When he sees Kono studying the fish, Wallis calls him a "big kahuna" and says, "You're crazy out of your kanaka head."

Soon enough, both Akamai and Wallis are also murdered with the mollusc. The killer is revealed to be Jack Manoa (William Valentine), houseboy to the three. Manoa seems to be a step up from a typical butler type. When Akamai went out on his yacht, Manoa also came along, and, in fact, saved Akamai when he got into trouble while spearfishing.

Manoa's triple murder is an act of revenge because the salesmen were responsible for the death of his 16-year-old daughter Tia. They corrupted her with drugs ("a hundred-and-fifty-a-day habit") and filmed her making porno with the camera and recorder. She died from infectious hepatitis, thanks to a dirty needle. As Manoa poisons Wallis, the last of his victims, he tells him that "your filth became her filth," adding, "Isn't it fitting that the three of you should die from a needle?"

This show features outstanding color photography and there are a lot of interesting touches.

Danno has a couple of great sarcastic lines, like when Akamai tells him, "Listen, cop, I don't like you here. You're busting up my party." (Akamai has two "broads," Donna (Cathy Musket) and Eadie (Shannan Kincaid), one on each arm.) When he continues, "I'm going fishing. You wanna ask me any more questions, you gotta come in the water," Danno tells him, "Hey, Akamai, I can think of at least a dozen things I'd rather do than babysit you."

McGarrett is understandably frustrated trying to figure out what killed the three men, and a bit "touchy." Considering how much work Danno and Kono do in this show, it's annoying to see McGarrett get most of the action at the end, when he and Kono board the harbor police boat Sea Venture and pursue Manoa as he heads towards the Big Island. (The HPD boat leaves from Makai Pier, later featured in the post-Five-O Jack Lord-directed pilot "M Station Hawaii," thanks to Fred.)

William Valentine gives a very good performance as the aggrieved father in the first of his seven roles on the show. (The next one, venereal disease investigator Jacob Kalema in season five's "Chain of Events," is also connected with sleazy subject matter.) The editing in the sequence where Manoa poisons Wallis, which is intercut with Chin Ho talking to Danno, is very interesting, as is the finale where Danno in a helicopter is helping McGarrett catch Manoa, who has fled in Akamai's sailboat.

However, I think it would have been more effective if we had not seen the Cloth of Gold which Manoa had under the tray of food he was taking to Wallis' room, basically previewing the fact that was the killer!

WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN?

"Cloth of gold" is the name of the poisonous sea snail responsible for four deaths in the show.

EPISODE PROMO:

Click here to see the promo. Use the back key in your browser to return to this screen.

CASUALTY LIST:

MORE TRIVIA:

GALLERY:

Click on images below to see them large size. Use the back button in your browser to return to this page.

OR...

Click here for a slide show of all the large images.

Return to Quick Index


93. (S04E21) “Good Night, Baby — Time To Die!” ★★★  BOOK HER 

Original air date: 2/22/72 — Opening CreditsEnd Credits
Director: Alf Kjellin; Producer: William Finnegan; Writer: Abram S. Ginnes; Music: Don B. Ray
Timings: Teaser: 4:06; Main Titles: 0:58; Act One: 14:29; Act Two: 11:50; Act Three: 12:44; Act Four: 6:11; End Credits: 0:35; Total Time: 50:53.

QUICK PLOT:

McGarrett sets up an elaborate protective system around a young woman to capture her former boyfriend who seemingly has escaped from prison.

Click here to read Full Plot.

REVIEW:

This is an interesting episode because it only has two characters aside from McGarrett and the Five-O team plus Duke: Carol Rhodes (the sexy Beth Brickell) and L.B. Barker (the menacing William Watson).

Barker has been in jail for the first-degree murder three years before of his partner Wayne McCabe. As the show begins, Barker is seen faking illness which gets him taken to the infirmary at Honolulu's Oahu State Prison where he has been in solitary for six months. Possessing a gun, which maybe is a fake, he escapes and goes over the wall (with a rope!).

Barker then starts to make his way to Rhodes' apartment, which is actually in the Sheraton Waikiki. McGarrett is already there, having woken Rhodes up, though the time frame in the show suggests this is well into the morning. Suspecting that Barker is coming there with the intention of knocking her off, McGarrett has arranged for a large police presence outside the building. Inside, the cops have set up a command center with maps to co-ordinate efforts to track Barker down.

Barker is seen stealing a car. Following this, he robs a gun shop, taking a .38 Special and a box of bullets, knocks the shopkeeper out and steals his clothes. Pursued by a patrol cop, Barker eventually abandons the car when he sees he is being tailed. But he is relatively close to Rhodes' place.

Barker phones Rhodes at her apartment after McGarrett arrives. He tells her, "I'm out. And I'm coming to get you. You, baby, like I said I would. Beautiful and dead. By sunset tonight. Dead, baby." She abandons any plans of fleeing to the airport, though this certainly might have been a good option.

In her apartment, Rhodes has a well-stocked bar and she begins drinking. McGarrett wants to know why Barker wants to kill her, since McGarrett was away in Switzerland in 1968, suffering from burnout from the first nine years of his job when events relating to Barker's and Rhodes' case took place. (This corresponds to a 1968 trip to Switzerland — though that was not "on vacation" — that McGarrett took that was mentioned earlier in this season's "The Ninety-Second War," S04E16 & S04E17.)

Rhodes fills us in with her biography. She was abandoned by her parents and ended up "wiped out" from a life which included foster homes as well as "pineapples and men away on conventions" by the age of 17 when she met Barker and McCabe. Busted for a break and enter when she was with these two, she was given probation, but went on another job with them and was almost run over by Alfred Townsend when she was fleeing after the job went wrong.

Townsend, described later by McGarrett as "old, … in poor health, [and with] … only a modest retirement," said that he would "take care" of her and the two of them fell in love, though she says "It wasn't sex … he didn't use me like everybody else."

Rhodes tells McGarrett that Townsend, who was the curator of the Beckmann Museum, "taught me, little by little," and "I had a home for the first time in my life." Barker didn't take too kindly to this relationship, however, making "crazy calls" and "dirty threats" against Townsend.

Three years ago, there was a large scale robbery at this museum. Over a million dollars worth of gemstones were taken, "some of them historically famous." Three days after this robbery, Townsend was found dead with two bullets in him and his car wrecked. And a month after the robbery, Barker was arrested for murdering McCabe, which is what led to his prison stretch.

McGarrett says it is odd that Barker's record includes robberies, bad checks and stolen credit cards, but no violence. At his trial, Barker said that McCabe owed him some money, but when he went to collect it, McCabe fired at him twice and Barker shot him dead. (I think that qualifies as "violence"!)

When McGarrett asks Rhodes who killed Townsend, she says Barker, but McGarrett points out on the day that Townsend died, Barker was being grilled by cops at HPD, held on suspicion of the museum robbery. Rhodes changes her tune, then saying that it's more likely that McCabe shot Townsend, and Barker put him up to it.

She finally admits that Townsend was involved with the robbery but only providing his knowledge of the museum to Barker who was like a cat burglar and McCabe who had skills with electronics he had picked up in the navy. After the jewels were stolen, Townsend was to dispose of them, and he told Rhodes, "If anything happens to me, it's L.B. or Wayne, because they want it all." Soon after, he was found dead, and the jewelry was gone.

Rhodes gets another threatening call from Barker, who is now right outside the building. Barker supposedly knocks out one of the cops (Rhodes can see the aftermath of this from her apartment balcony), and sneaks into the hotel laundry room and up the laundry chute to a floor above Rhodes, who is now getting very nervous.

McGarrett plays a case-sette recording of a call he got from some guy who says he is a junkie and former friend of McCabe's from the navy. On the tape, this guy says he was staying at McCabe's when Barker shot him dead. After the killing, someone came in to the house and took McCabe's gun. McGarrett tries to put words in the increasingly drunk Rhodes' mouth by saying she told him "L.B. went there [to McCabe's] and Wayne fired twice and L.B. killed him," but she didn't say this previously at all, at least that we hear in the show. It was McGarrett who told her "McCabe fired at him [Barker] twice; L.B. killed him."

Barker is seen precariously moving on the outside of the building jumping from one room to the next via the balconies, and it is obvious that it is a stuntman, because his hair color is totally different than William Watson's. Barker then uses a rope (no idea where he got this!) and rappels down the side of the building to Rhodes' balcony where the resulting thump is heard inside by both Rhodes and McGarrett.

Coming into the room, Barker seems to knock McGarrett out and threatens Rhodes with his gun. Knowing she is going to die, she tells him that she was the one who set him up with McCabe and was the one who put blanks in McCabe's gun before Barker got there, then returned to the house and took McCabe's gun and the shells that the junkie mentioned. She tells Barker, "I did it because I thought one of you killed Alfred. And I thought I loved him, but I didn't." She is still lying, however, and Barker knows this, saying he wants her to die "with a big fat lie still in your mouth."

Rhodes tells him, "I did it. You know it. I'm dumb to lie to you. I killed Alfred, but I did it for us. After we pulled the job, I told him we could live like kings. And that stupid ... gets in his car to go to the cops to turn us in, for his reputation. After we pull the most beautiful job in the world, I'm gonna let him squeal and louse up everything? You bet I killed him. I killed him for us."

Rhodes also tells Barker that she got half a million dollars in insurance money from Townsend's estate. Barker says, "When I read about it in the paper six months ago, I saw red, blood red," which is why he went crazy and was locked him up in solitary.

Barker almost looks as if he is buying into what Rhodes is telling him, but when she says that she wants to knock off the supposedly unconscious McGarrett with his own gun, Barker tells her "Turn around and look, baby." McGarrett is not knocked out at all.

McGarrett says that everything that has transpired is a deception which he engineered "with the cooperation of the DA and a court order. We got L.B. out of prison this morning, brought him here under armed guard. He's been sitting in the manager's office all day. That's where he called you from. All staged, for your benefit." All the scenes we have seen of Barker escaping jail, stealing the car, robbing the gun store and eating noodles were figments of Rhodes' imagination.

When Rhodes says her half a million will "buy a lot of lawyers," McGarrett shows her his case-sette recorder, which taped the entire confession she made to Barker and he plays back a choice excerpt. Rhodes is booked; McGarrett tells Barker "See you in court."

This show is sort of clever in the way it jerks us (and Rhodes) around, but there are several questions:

No doubt Jack Lord's theatrical experience served him well in this episode, since it is almost like a filmed stage play. The score is by Ray, and contains various stock themes like the violin theme, the trombone interval theme and "memories" (actually by Stevens) when Rhodes recalls her relationship with Townsend. As Rhodes is freaking out, the camera has these extreme closeups of one of her gorgeous blue eyes!

EPISODE PROMO:

Click here to see the promo. Use the back key in your browser to return to this screen.

CASUALTY LIST:

MORE TRIVIA:

GALLERY:

Click on images below to see them large size. Use the back button in your browser to return to this page.

OR...

Click here for a slide show of all the large images.

Return to Quick Index


94. (S04E22) “Didn't We Meet At A Murder?” ★★½

Original air date: 2/29/72 — Opening CreditsEnd Credits
Director: Paul Stanley; Producer: William Finnegan; Writer: Jerome Coopersmith; Music: Don B. Ray
Timings: Teaser: 2:35; Main Titles: 0:57; Act One: 8:08; Act Two: 9:37; Act Three: 11:26; Act Four: 16:26; End Credits: 0:35; Total Time: 49:44.

QUICK PLOT:

Three people with something to hide in their pasts are blackmailed to participate in an intricate plot involving the murder of a Chicago mobster.

Click here to read Full Plot.

REVIEW:

On the surface, this episode seems clever. A convoluted scheme is set up to accomplish a perfect crime supported by perfect alibis. But if you think hard about it, the plot logic for much of the show – especially the back story – isn't developed very well.

A character named Chang (Kwan Hi Lim) is the boss of Lanai Carpet Company, a store in a run-down part of Honolulu, next door to a branch of the Hawaiian Fourth Federal Bank. This provides an opportunity to tunnel through the basement wall between the buildings into the bank and to steal money from its vault. (Whether you end up tunneling into the vault itself is a good question.) The owner of the carpet store died recently and it was put up for sale by his estate. Chang, or whoever he represents, had been leasing the building, and he and his cohorts bid on it.

However, a "big syndicate man" from Chicago named Maurice Mauritany, whose "track record" is with "gambling, narcotics and extortion" (Simon Oakland, in a relatively restrained performance) puts in his own bid. It is not said how Mauritany knew about the criminal potential connected with this store's location.

Because of Mauritany's bid, Chang's group withdrew their offer. Soon after this, Mauritany, described as a "grim Neanderthal," comes to Hawaii to deal with things personally. There is nothing said about how Chang and his people knew in advance that Mauritany was coming to Hawaii on some specific date.

McGarrett goes to the airport to give Mauritany the "Unwelcome Wagon" treatment, but cannot stop him from pursuing his interests. McGarrett tells him, "One slip, one shtick, and you're going to feel like Kilauea [the most active volcano on the big island of Hawaii] went off right under those 60-dollar shoes."

The people running the carpet store obviously don't want Mauritany to take possession of the place, because they are aware of its money-making potential and want to steal the money themselves. To help with a scheme to knock off Mauritany, three individuals are found, all of whom have something "bad" in their past. Chang tracks down these three and threatens to blackmail them unless they co-operate. They are:

OK, so think about this. How could this team be assembled, considering how diverse their "transgressions" are? It's not like some kind of employment agency exists where people are listed who could be blackmailed to do your bidding for something illegal. Not only is this trio diverse, the set-up connected with how they do their job is complicated:

All three of the killers end up in Mauritany's room around the same time, and they all shoot him with guns which have the bores scraped with a "high-speed reaming tool" which removes all the lands and grooves and that have special silencers that keep their shell casings from falling on the floor. Once the murder is over, all three leave quickly, but in a staggered fashion, so it appears unlikely they were there together during the killing, based on the approximate time of death later determined by the coroner. All three are tracked down by their fingerprints they left in the place, connected with their driver's licenses, and interviewed by Five-O. Their alibis all mesh perfectly with each other's.

McGarrett and Chin check out the carpet store after finding that Wellman was tipped off by an acquaintance at the Real Estate Board that it was the specific building Mauritany was going to buy. Despite "everything falling apart" in the deteriorated 50-year-old structure, it seems to be a thriving business.

While they are at the store, McGarrett recognizes one of the employees, a forklift operator named Charlie Saunders (uncredited actor), an "ex-warrant officer, military intelligence and ex-private detective." McGarrett previously had dealings with Charlie, who was convicted two years ago of bribery and conspiracy to obstruct justice. Of Charlie's case, McGarrett later says he "worked on it, slept on it, put him away."

After this visit, Chin is delegated to do surveillance on the store from the roof of a building across the street, and when Chin spies Wellman showing up there to receive an envelope, he immediate alerts the office.

Danno drives quickly to Wellman's place. He confronts Wellman on the street outside the building, uttering the usual Five-O threat of seizing something (the envelope) for which a warrant would normally be required by saying "If you want a warrant, I'll get you one." Wellman escapes from Danno and rushes to his apartment, but then jumps from the balcony, committing suicide. The contents of the envelope, several pictures of women, are found partially burned in his bathroom sink. When McGarrett sees a bunch of similar photos of women on the wall, he tells Danno, "These beautiful friends of Wellman's ... They're men." Danno looks dumbfounded.

Does this make sense? Why would Chang be giving Wellman the photos in the envelope? Hadn't Wellman "finished his job"? Or was this all part of a big scheme, to get Wellman to kill himself?

The improbabilities up to this point are matched only by how McGarrett and the Five-O team have a huge brainstorm connecting all the dots, specifically Saunders' and Chang's criminal relationship.

McGarrett tells Chin to contact the county clerk and "See if the plans for that building are on file. If they are, get them up here along with a county engineer." A county engineer named Paul (John Alexis Howard, uncredited) brings plans and maps of the carpet store and surrounding area to the Five-O offices.

When Paul says the word "bank" in the list of nearby buildings, McGarrett, tipped off by Saunders' criminal past, speculates that Charlie and Chang were already working on tunneling into the bank when the owner died and the carpet store was put up for sale. Not only that, the ex-P.I. Charlie was the one who came up "with three people to pull the trigger ... people that Mauritany would never suspect."

In other words, just by guessing, McGarrett figures out everything exactly as it has transpired so far! From this point on, the story sort of makes sense ... with the emphasis on "sort of."

The surveilling Chin witnesses Brown showing up at the carpet store in his TV repair truck. Clem has been persuaded by the threat of further blackmail to help remove money from the bank theft (which is happening right now). However, after he flees and he is nabbed by numerous HPD cops who chase him in a variety of stock shots after being alerted by Chin, the boxes Clem has taken which supposedly contain money are found to contain dirt from tunnelling into the bank.

We cut back to the bank where Chang, Charlie and a couple of other guys (one of whom is Walter Omori, the "mysterious actor" from "The Singapore File" and other episodes) are nabbed red-handed when they go into the vault because McGarrett and Danno are already inside it waiting to greet them. (Has there been a delay from the time the robbers gave Clem the boxes of dirt until then?) McGarrett has a pretty bad pun as he confronts the baddies: "Using Clem and his truck was a smart diversion, Charlie, but there was a hole in your plan." DUH!

The ending at the airport, where McGarrett busts Soames and her stud boyfriend who are attempting to flee to Singapore by plane, the latter because of his participation in the murder of her husband, is kind of lame. How does McGarrett know that that is where they are going? We don't see the actual confrontation and arrest, just a long shot of McGarrett putting them in his car with a voice-over from him. Rick goes in via the driver's side door and slides over on the front seat.

One thing I will grant this show, it is well done from a production point of view, ignoring the fact the writer, Jerome Coopersmith (one of the best!) seemed to be "trying out something new." There is some interesting editing in the scene where Mauritany gets knocked off and also where the three killers are grilled in the Five-O offices.

There are also some envelope-pushing moments with the revelation about Wellman's sexual life and the inter-racial marriage of Clem and his Asian wife Doris.

The score, attributed to Ray, is another mishmash of familiar motifs including the "memories," "violin" and "trombone interval" themes. The first time we hear the "memories" theme, it is inserted rather jarringly into the scene where Brown and his wife Doris are eating lunch in their shop.

EPISODE PROMO:

Click here to see the promo. Use the back key in your browser to return to this screen.

CASUALTY LIST:

LOCATIONS:

Fred Helfing tracked down numerous locations from this episode:

MORE TRIVIA:

MUSIC:

Score by Don B. Ray.

The two times at the beginning of each line in the list below are when the cue appears in the show and the length of the cue. Click the arrow in the player to hear a suite containing these cues. To finish before the end, click the stop (‖‖) button. The number in red is the approximate time you will hear the cue in the suite.

#1, 00:00, 00:51, 00:00, Opening wave, Chang meets Clem at TV shop, then Wellman at his office.
#2, 01:12, 00:56, 00:51, Wellman examines gun at his office, segue to Soames' place, boyfriend kisses girl, does push ups.
#3, 02:20, 01:11, 01:46, Chang shows Soames Mauritany's picture, segues into main titles.
#4, 03:33, 00:08, 02:58, H50 office, they discuss Mauritany's pending arrival.
#5, 03:51, 00:32, 03:05, Main titles are flashed on screen, broken up.
#6, 06:59, 00:42, 03:37, McGarrett "greets" Mauritany at Honolulu airport.
#7, 08:31, 01:19, 04:19, Clem talks to Doris at TV shop, segue to Wellman who leaves his office, switch to Mauritany's hotel room, Soames and Mauritany are there.
#8, 11:14, 00:25, 05:38, Mauritany is shot by the three assassins, Wave at end of Act One.
#9, 11:41, 01:08, 06:02, The three leave, McGarrett and forensics arrive.
#10, 13:51, 00:08, 07:10, A chord transition.
#11, 17:28, 00:09, 07:18, McGarrett and Chin go to Soames' place, she is hostile to him.
#12, 19:16, 01:59, 07:27, Clem drives to lookout, Chang throws guns and photos in a case into the ocean, Wave at end of Act Two.
#13, 21:55, 00:22, 09:26, Soames sees her stud boyfriend flirting with dame he kissed earlier.
#14, 23:40, 00:34, 09:48, McGarrett and Chin arrive at the carpet store.
#15, 28:03, 01:08, 10:22, Clem goes to bungalow where Chang wants another favor, Danno calls McGarrett.
#16, 31:41, 01:00, 11:30, Wellman escapes from Danno, he jumps from the building; Wave at end of Act Three.
#17, 32:55, 05:16, 12:30, Scene at Wellman's apartment with forensics, McGarrett tells Danno the women in pictures on the wall are men; segue to Clem and Josie in bed, discussing his dilemma; segue to Five-O office.
#18, 38:48, 00:16, 17:46, Two separate cues combined, brainstorming in Five-O office.
#19, 43:18, 01:16, 18:02, Crooks take money from bank through tunnel, Clem drives away with boxes, he is pursued by cops.
#20, 46:33, 02:35, 19:18, Guys try to leave carpet store with money, but the place is surrounded, they go back into store and into tunnel, but McGarrett and Danno are there; segue to scene at airport where Soames and boyfriend are busted.

GALLERY:

Click on images below to see them large size. Use the back button in your browser to return to this page.

OR...

Click here for a slide show of all the large images.

Return to Quick Index


95. (S04E23) “Follow The White Brick Road” ★★★

Original air date: 3/7/72-- Opening CreditsEnd Credits
Director: Michael O'Herlihy; Producer: William Finnegan; Writer: John Furia; Music: Don Ray
Timings: Teaser: 4:56; Main Titles: 0:57; Act One: 6:44; Act Two: 10:21; Act Three: 10:27; Act Four: 16:40; End Credits: 0:34; Total Time: 50:39.

QUICK PLOT:

Danno goes undercover to flush out a drug ring operating from a vessel in the U.S. Seventh Fleet.

Click here to read Full Plot.

REVIEW:

The show begins with Albert R. Woodley (Stephen Matthews), a US Navy sailor, delivering a kilo of heroin ("10,000 jolts") to the White Horse Tattoo Parlor in Honolulu, after evading a couple of Navy men who are pursuing him. This place is run by John Surigao (Moki Palacio). Soon after Woodley leaves, he drops dead on the street.

Before the main credits, there is a screenful of text saying "The producers gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the Department of Defence and the United States Navy." One wonders why they were co-operative, since the show is about sailors smuggling smack into Hawaii!

Perhaps the show was intended to encourage drug addicted members of the military to apply to the Drug Exemption Program which was introduced with Department of Defense Directive 1300 11, dated October 23, 1970. It "authorizes the military departments, on a trial basis, to establish amnesty programs for drug users who voluntarily seek help. Such members will receive medical assistance and be exempted from punitive actions for drug use under UCMJ [the Uniform Code of Military Justice] and, if rehabilitation and restoration to full duty is not indicated, will be considered for discharge under honorable conditions." One wonders, though, whether sailors would see this public service announcement aimed at them either while they were serving in Vietnam or on their way back to the States.

At a meeting in the Governor's office, McGarrett tells his boss, "We think another kilo might be coming in" on the USS John Haskell which leaves Subic Bay in the Philippines the next morning after a tour with the Seventh Fleet. "John Haskell" were the last words uttered by Woodley before he expired. Also at this meeting is Admiral Sample, played by real-life Admiral Joseph McGoldrick, who says, "The Navy has the same problems that you have, governor. Some of our men face bigger risks from drugs than they do from bullets."

In his usual capacity as a "young man" capable of looking like he could be in the military, Danno takes a fast plane to Subic and goes undercover on board the Haskell posing as an assistant to the Chief Hospital Corpsman Franklyn (Charles Gilbert) to try and figure out how the heroin is being smuggled. Danno has no luck in finding "H" anywhere. He tells Franklyn, "we haven't even turned up a joint of marijuana so far."

Danno encounters one sailor who got addicted to heroin in Nam, Petty Officer Second Class Arte Salton (Mark Jenkins of season three's "The Bomber and Mrs. Moroney"). The increasingly nervous and twitchy Salton is desperate to get a fix, having already arranged to buy eight "dime bags" from Damage Controlman Third Class Dillon (David Birney). Danno is successful in getting Salton to seriously consider the Exemption Program, but when Salton goes to see Dillon for a refund of the money he has already put down, Dillon convinces him to forego waiting another four days until the ship reaches Pearl Harbor.

Back in Hawaii, Che Fong is feeling the pressure to come up with answers based on "scrapings off Woodley's shoes, pocket lint, hair, clothing, hat," anything. He finds a "granular chemical compound" under the fingernails of Woodley's right hand which he determines, with the help of four lab assistants, to be "potassium chlorinate," a non-existent chemical compound, later modified to "potassium bicarbonate," really used as a suppression agent in dry chemical fire extinguishers. Of course, McGarrett knows exactly what this is, what they "used to call Purple-K in the Navy."

Soon after this, seemingly not willing to let Danno deal with things on the Haskell by himself, McGarrett shows up on a tug (a real tug, USS Wahpeton (YTM-757)) and transfers to the Haskell, even though the Haskell is still two days away from Oahu. This does not make any sense — surely he would have arrived on a ship larger than this. The sequence where he transfers from the tug to the Haskell goes on for almost 3 and a half minutes, obviously taking advantage of the "co-operation" of the Navy.

The captain of the Haskell has the crew "run a test exercise" involving a man overboard (actually a dummy) to keep them distracted while Danno and others check out all the fire extinguishers on the ship to find where the heroin is hidden. Danno eventually locates it, but puts it back, and after the ship returns to port, a closed-circuit TV camera is quickly set up to monitor the particular extinguisher which contained the heroin. A workman identified in the credits only as "Hard Hat" (David Doyle, of Charlie's Angels fame) comes on board to retrieve the dope, but he is nabbed by McGarrett and the others, and forced to continue with the "drop," which is further surveilled.

Dillon picks up the drugs from a coin locker outside the Maluhia Service Club at Fort DeRussey and takes them to Surigao's place, where the two men are busted by Five-O. Unfortunately, Salton, who was found comatose after he went back on the drugs at Dillon's insistence, never recovered and died. McGarrett is disgusted at Surigao and Dillon's collusion, throwing a bundle of bills from Surigao's safe on a table.

Overall, this episode is not bad and generally has good intentions. But there are some annoyances.

The first one has to do with why Woodley died. After trying to determine the cause, Doc Bergman gives McGarrett the usual medical mumbo-jumbo, much more than usual, which has the top cop getting very exasperated. Bergman says Woodley was poisoned with "aconitine" (a real substance), an alkaloid toxin produced by a plant known by other names like monkshood. He says "Ten milligrams, less than a single drop, could cause death inside an hour." Virtually everything from Surigao's shop is examined by the lab, and nothing like this is found. It would have made sense if Woodley just died from a heroin overdose, but why would Surigao have let this happen, like giving him a free sample? It is not mentioned if Woodley was causing any problems. Killing him off like this would be about as stupid as fentanyl dealers killing off their customers more recently.

There are also questions about the voyage from the Philippines to Hawaii. At the beginning of the show, it is said that it takes 15 days. After we see Danno on the ship, a crew member says it will be another 4 days to get to Pearl Harbor, but only a few minutes later, someone else says it will take 6 days. As mentioned above, McGarrett does not join the ship until only 2 days are left.

The cameras set up to observe the business with the fire extinguisher seem to be installed and connected with great speed, even though this would likely require a lot of complicated wiring, and when Danno and Franklyn are watching a monitor, a look at the back of it suggests that it isn't even connected to the camera! When Doyle actually removes the heroin, the camera is at an improbable angle looking at him close-up from below.

The score is by Don Ray and has numerous instances of military-sounding motifs, as well as the "trombone interval theme." The music at the beginning of Act 2, where Salton tries desperately to find even a few grains of heroin in his "fixings," is very weird.

WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN?

The title is a pun on the line and song from The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, "follow the yellow brick road." Dorothy and her friends follow this road to the Emerald City where she will confront the wizard and ask him to return her to Kansas. In the context of the story, it refers to "a course of action that a person takes believing that it will lead to good things." In this Five-O episode, "white brick" refers to heroin with the suggestion that it will also lead "to good things."

EPISODE PROMO:

Click here to see the promo. Use the back key in your browser to return to this screen.

CASUALTY LIST:

MORE TRIVIA:

GALLERY:

Click on images below to see them large size. Use the back button in your browser to return to this page.

OR...

Click here for a slide show of all the large images.

Return to Quick Index


96. (S04E24) “R&R&R” ★★

Original air date: 3/14/72 — Opening CreditsEnd Credits
Director: Leo Penn; Producer: William Finnegan; Writer: Bill Stratton; Music: Don B. Ray
Timings: Teaser: 4:24; Main Titles: 0:57; Act One: 10:55; Act Two: 12:17; Act Three: 11:49; Act Four: 9:43; End Credits: 0:34 ; Total Time: 50:39.

QUICK PLOT:

A psychotic soldier targets wives of Army men who have come to Hawaii to meet their husbands on furlough.

Click here to read Full Plot.

REVIEW:

Ella Syzmanski (Robyn Millan) shows up in Hawaii to be with her Army sergeant husband August ("Augie") (Anthony Aiello). He has been delayed for a couple of days before arriving on R&R from duty in Vietnam. As she is taking a shower in her hotel room, she is brutally murdered by an intruder.

Doc Bergman knows the murder weapon was a bayonet, based on four years of experience in the medical corps. McGarrett is joined in his investigation by Army Provost Marshal Colonel Ken Hart (Richard LePore).

When McGarrett meets Ella's husband as he gets off the plane, he pushes things a bit too much when he asks if Augie's wife was "very lonely," which almost results in a punch in the face. A subsequent check by both Hart and Danno reveals that Augie and Ella were "very married."

McGarrett wants to talk to Syzmanski's commanding officer, Captain Dan Nicols (James Davidson). It turns out he is also due on R&R shortly. Nichols' wife Leslee (Jackie Russell), who has flown in to meet him, is greeted at the airport by "Jake Wheeler," an army sergeant, who takes her on the "scenic route, part of the officers' wives welcome tour," including to a viewpoint in an out-of-the-way location. Wheeler stabs her (we do not see him doing this) and pushes her off the cliff.

Her body is discovered quickly enough, and McGarrett recognizes the killer's "signature," the stabbing below the sternum. The car Wheeler was driving ("hot-wired, stolen from the headquarters parking lot at Fort Shafter") and the second-hand uniform he was wearing are also located by an HPD cop named T. Horner, abandoned outside Punchbowl Fender Works at 3427 Waialae Ave., a business still in existence in 2019.

Che Fong gets some ideas about Wheeler's identity from the uniform, and Kono, Danno and Chin Ho track down further clues about him and Leslee Nichols at the airport. Nichols arrives and McGarrett doesn't waste any time asking him who would want to kill him or his wife. Figuring out it is too much of a coincidence that two wives of men in the same company have been murdered, McGarrett asks Hart for records of every man in that company: "Could be somebody is using R&R for revenge."

We finally figure out who "Wheeler" is when he goes to a Marine recruiting office located near Kaimuki Sundries (another business still around today, almost across the street from Punchbowl Fender Works). Ralston talks to a sergeant named Philippo (Philip Heron) about his pending application to the Marines. Philippo tells him that a computer spit him out, revealing his real name to be "Thomas Robert Ralston." The recruiter tells him "the Marine Corps doesn't need used meat with a phony name," and recommends that he join the Foreign Legion instead. Outside the office, Ralston rants at people on the sidewalk, showing them his Distinguished Service Cross that he got for "meritoriously wasting a bunch of Charlies."

Back at Five-O headquarters, McGarrett, Hart, Nichols and Syzmanski are studying the records of officers in Nichols' company. Ralston was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross on Nichols' recommendation because "he closed down a VC mortar squad all by himself." He asked for transfer out of the company because he had "gone as high as he could" as far as his rank was concerned. Two months ago, Ralston received a medical discharge in Colorado.

Meanwhile, Ralston, pretending to be Nichols, sends a Western Union telegram to Amy Carter (Marie Cheatham) wife of another former fellow officer, Lt. Dennis Carter, who we saw at the beginning of the show, played by Richard Kelton. He is not expected to come to Hawaii for another month, but the telegram says that he is due for five days of R&R, arriving the next day, and his wife should come to Hawaii immediately. However, after Carter's wife leaves Florida, a Army man comes to her house to tell her mother that the lieutenant has been killed in action.

Alerted to this, Five-O gets busy, with only a few hours before Amy Carter arrives. A police artist's sketch of Ralston is produced with the help of the agent from the telegraph office (Moki Palacio). Information about Ralston's discharge reveals it was because of a Section Eight, meaning he was judged unfit for medical service because he was "paranoid, aggressive-defensive," and had "tendencies to violence." Szyzmanski reveals that on one occasion, Ralston flipped out, demonstrating crazy behavior. McGarrett lays hard into Nichols, who says that he didn't take action after this outburst, and when Ralston wanted to apply for OCS, neither Ralston nor Carter would recommend him for this.

Nichols says, "I made an error in judgment," to which McGarrett snaps, "An error in judgment? I'd say you were more interested in keeping your sharp outfit looking sharp. The guy needed a head doctor and you give him a transfer. And you pass that off as an error in judgment?" Nichols counters with, "That's what it was, McGarrett. And I've paid for it."

Amy Carter arrives in Honolulu, and McGarrett, Hart and a policewoman named Cathy Miller (Genevieve Nelson) board the plane. Miller is going to pretend to be Carter when she disembarks. Only problem is, Ralston knows what Carter's wife looks like, so he knows something is up when he sees her after paging her in the airport.

Policewoman Miller is taken to Fort DeRussy, but McGarrett suddenly has a brainstorm on the way there when he realizes that Ralston has probably seen a picture that Cathy mentioned in the plane, part of her husband's possessions, that "has been around the world with him."

Returning to the plane, McGarrett finds Hart knocked out and Ralston holding Cathy hostage. McGarrett taunts Ralston, who attacks him with the bayonet, which McGarrett grabs, seriously cutting his left hand. McGarrett pulls out his gun with the other hand and shoots Ralston dead.

From the perspective of "don't think about it too hard," this show is not bad, but there are several issues.

The first has to do with "What is 'OCS'?" which is part of an important plot point in the show.

OCS stands for "Officer Candidate School." Completing OCS is one of several ways of becoming a U.S. Army commissioned officer.

Platoon sergeant Ralston saved everyone's lives by closing down a VC mortar squad by himself. Nichols recommended him for the DSC (Distinguished Service Cross), after which Ralston requested a transfer, because, as Nichols says, "He'd gone as high as he could in my company. He deserved more rank."

This transfer was granted, according to Nichols, because Rolston "wanted it" and "it was better for discipline." After Ralston got the DSC, he "began coming on kind of strong," which culminated in an incident when he was ordered to turn out the lights in his bunker and refused, and when ordered to do so by Lieutenant Carter, he picked up a rifle and shot out the lights. He then hit Szymanski, but because it was not possible to prove 100% that he did this on purpose, the incident was not reported to Nichols, who says that even if he knew Ralston was guilty, "How do I bring charges against a guy I put in for the DSC?"

Two months prior to the date of the show, Ralston "really flipped out" and received a medical discharge in Colorado. According to a psychiatrist's report, Ralston said, "I was regular Army, headed for the high cotton, wanted to put in for OCS, but they [Nichols, Szymanski and Carter] wouldn't recommend me and that tore it, really tore it."

The plan of revenge against the three who Ralston figures messed up his future is complicated.

First, he has to get information on when the men are coming back to Hawaii for R&R. Hart says "There are orders posted in hallways and offices, and a phone call or two would get [a] flight number." Considering Hawaii was the number one choice for married soldiers to get together with their wives during Vietnam R&R, you have to wonder how many people would be on these lists, and how detailed they would be, even down to giving Ralston the exact address of Carter's wife to send the telegram to, for example. The staff car which Ralston stole was from the Fort Shafter parking lot, suggesting a lack of security.

Ralston also gets a sergeant's uniform to spoof Nichols' wife, including a name tag, though this could be purchased through a store selling used uniforms. After he abandons this uniform with the staff car and Mrs. Nichols' luggage, he then gets another uniform, that of a captain, to pretend that he is Nichols when sending the telegram.

Though motivated by his psychotic hatred for the three men, Ralston comes across a kind of a dim bulb, a Southern "farm boy," who Szymanski refers to as "Tommy Bob." The fact that Ralston tries to join the Marines, not expecting them to connect him to his army career, is a dumb move, because this would not get him closer to OCS; he would have to start at the bottom and work his way up through the ranks just like he would with the army.

The ending of the show doesn't make any sense to me. Colonel Hart is on the plane with Carter's widow Amy, and is supposed to be taking care of her until she can return on the next flight. Ralston comes up the boarding stairs and into the plane, but surely Hart would recognize him and then take action! Instead of stabbing Hart with his bayonet, Ralston knocks him out, which is not his normal M.O.; Ralston doesn't seem like someone who prefers hand-to-hand combat.

Rather than just kill Amy right off the bat, Ralston takes her hostage with a blade to her throat when McGarrett, being clever, returns to the plane, realizing that something is screwy. I think Ralston was surprised by McGarrett's sudden entry into the plane, actually. Ralston seems to being trying to hide with Amy in the plane's galley, perhaps having heard McGarrett clumping up the boarding stairs. McGarrett grabbing the bayonet is one of those can't-forget-scenes from the series!

WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN?

R&R is military slang for "rest and recuperation," "rest and relaxation," or "rest and recreation." The third "R" in this show's title means "Revenge."

EPISODE PROMO:

Click here to see the promo. Use the back key in your browser to return to this screen.

CASUALTY LIST:

MORE TRIVIA:

GALLERY:

Click on images below to see them large size. Use the back button in your browser to return to this page.

OR...

Click here for a slide show of all the large images.

Return to Quick Index


JUMP TO ANOTHER SEASON:

CLASSIC FIVE-O (1968-1980):
| Pilot Movie (Episode "0") | 1st Season (Episodes 1-23) | 2nd Season (Episodes 24-48) | 3rd Season (Episodes 49-72) | 5th Season (Episodes 97-120) | 6th Season (Episodes 121-144) | 7th Season (Episodes 145-168) | 8th Season (Episodes 169-191) | 9th Season (Episodes 192-214) | 10th Season (Episodes 215-238) | 11th Season (Episodes 239-259) | 12th Season (Episodes 260-278) | 13th Season |

NEW FIVE-0 (2010-2020):
| 1st Season | 2nd Season | 3rd Season | 4th Season | 5th Season | 6th Season | 7th Season | 8th Season | 9th Season | 10th Season | "Next" Season |

RETURN TO THE SITE'S MAIN PAGECOMPREHENSIVE INDEX