by Mr. Mike » Sat Feb 04, 2017 8:39 am
Some of this show was OK, but the comedy with Grover at the beginning was cretinous. So stupid!! Didn't think much of the strike against Kamekona's shrimp shack either. And the shark-related sub-plot was also unnecessary and had nothing to do with the crime of the week (the Nazi hiding on Molokai).
Unfortunate that when you have such a huge cast you have to give each of the characters as much face time as possible during each show.
If they had removed some of the above crap, the ending where they found the sheriff and her father in Arizona wouldn't have had to be so abrupt. And what's with Louis Armstrong singing "It's a Wonderful World" during the final sequence?
by Mr. Mike » Sun Feb 05, 2017 11:27 amThis show, reviewed:
http://fiveohomepage.com/2010-log7.htm#15
by todd » Wed Feb 08, 2017 2:48 amMike, I agree very much with your review. Most of the things you mentioned were ones I noticed myself.
However, I am surprised you didn't call out the silliness regarding how they were able to PERFECTLY age a photo from age 19 to 91, to where it looked exactly like the old guy! Age progression technology is not even close to being that accurate.
I agree that the Grover segment with the breakfast was stupid, as was the obnoxious and recurring Kamekona shrimp strike saga. The strike itself was also ridiculous. Five employees of a food truck were unionizing? Come on. It did give some insight into the politics I assumed in an earlier post about Danny -- namely that he was an east coast liberal. His strong support for organized labor makes that even more likely.
The shark story wasn't a very good one, and it felt weird given how unrelated it was to the Molokai Nazi story. Like you, I felt the shark story should have been dropped completely, and more time should have been devoted to the Molokai one.
The woman playing the shark whisperer was a TERRIBLE actress. I realize that she was a real-life shark swimmer and not an actress, but I don't understand why the show does these things. As most people were unlikely to know her, they could have cast a real actress in the role, and the acting wouldn't have been noticeably bad as it was here. Fortunately, that segment was short. The show has cast other mostly-unknown non-actors in roles reminiscent of their real life situation/profession, but I don't believe it brings anything to the show besides distracting bad acting. The one exception was the prior week's episode where Bumpy, the leader of National of Hawaii, did a great job playing himself.
The Molokai Nazi story wasn't bad, but it had the potential to be much better. As a Jew myself, I am always interested in Nazi stories, especially ones involving bringing Nazi war criminals to justice (though 72 years after WWII ended, these stories are about to become impossible to do when set in the present.) This episode was able to stretch it into the present by making the Nazi war criminal 19 years old just as the war was ending in 1945, allowing him to be "only" 91 today.
I assume the episode was really filmed on Molokai, an island most viewers have not visited. I would have liked to have seen more of Molokai, and more of the Five-Zero team interacting with the locals (many of whom hadn't left the island in 50+ years), perhaps running into distrust and stonewalling. I would even liked to have seen some more possible suspects introduced, before the big reveal about the Nazi hunting connection. Sadly, this was not possible given the other segments of the show. I feel they really blew a chance to have an intriguing episode. This one was just okay.
My only issue with Mike's review came from his frustration with the quick apprehension of the suspects in Arizona. I didn't have a problem with that. If this situation occurred in real life, indeed it would have been a big story and appeared all over news stations and social media, as McGarrett said. This would have likely resulted in a quick apprehension of the suspects, especially with one being 91 and likely not able to move around as easily. They never explained how the Nazi and his daughter were able to get out of Hawaii so easily (since you can't simply drive from Hawaii to another state), but perhaps more time passed than we felt when watching the episode, allowing them a full day or so to get to Honolulu and grab a quick flight to the mainland.
I actually did like them placing a scene in between the escape and the capture, even if it was a dumb "filler" scene. At first I thought this was going to be another annoying (and this time pointless) cliffhanger, but to my satisfaction, it was resolved.
There was a somewhat similar, albeit science fiction, Nazi hunter type episode in the 1995 revival of "The Outer Limits".
In this 1999 episode, the son of a concentration camp survivor, now a lawyer in his 40s, sets out to convict a former Nazi SS Guard who had killed his half-sister and father's previous wife, with his father being the only survivor. The Nazi shot his father's wife in front of him and their young daughter, and then sent the daughter away to the gas chambers. When he fails to present enough evidence to convict him, he is visited by a descendant of his from the future, who has a time travel machine, but is not supposed to alter events from the past. Instead, this descendant goes to 1944 and steals various items of the Nazi, hoping that these could be presented as better evidence to arrest and convict him.
When that fails, they kidnap the old Nazi (who is supposed to be approximately 80 years old), and bring him back to 1944. Mistaken for a Jew, he is grabbed by his younger self, who is about to shoot him. The older version tries to convince the younger version of who he is, and tells a story no one ever had known about his father beating him for destroying a bicycle. Instead of being impressed, the younger version of the Nazi gets uncomfortable, and shoots his older self dead.
In the meantime, they grab the young girl (the main character's half sister, killed in 1944), and bring her to the present, and present her again to her elderly father, who believed he lost her 55 years prior.
It was actually a very well done episode, and a fan favorite.
The similarity here comes from the child of a male concentration camp survivor dedicating their life to bringing justice to an old former Nazi, for the murder of a child relative during WWII. I do wonder if the writers of this episode saw that Outer Limits episode.