Hawaii Five-0 3x02: Kanalua

Hawaii puts the 'fun' in funeral.

While the team mourns the loss of Chin's wife, some bad dudes commit an armed robbery at an art gallery. Thanks to some snazzy driving, three guys get away, but one takes two bullets to the gut and gets left behind. He takes hostages, but bleeds out during a stand-off with the team, and the situation resolves itself. It makes it a little hard to question him, though.

He's dead, Steve.

Fortunately, the driver and the getaway car both turn up relatively quickly. Unfortunately, they're both extra tasty crispy at this point, so the 5-0 team is left with two dead guys and no leads. Luckily, they have a friend in the art theft world: TV's Ed Asner.

Personally, I prefer original recipe.

I have to admit that I wasn't terribly enthused when I heard they were bringing back Ed Asner's character. He played a villain on the original Hawaii Five-O thirty years ago, and they brought him back last season in an episode that I didn't particularly enjoy. But, I guess it must've just been the material, because I quite liked his performance this time. Even though he's 82 (which is about 120 years younger than I thought he was), he's still got some juice.

Ed Asner has no time for your crap.

McGarrett and Danno ask Ed a few questions, but he doesn't know what's up. However, since he's an old man and cherishes his "me time" he agrees to make a few inquiries in exchange for the two of them getting the hell out of his face. Elsewhere, Max boils the crispy guy's face off and uses magic TV forensics technology to identify him as retired stock car driver Tyler MacNamara. I realize that it's just the way things are done on television these days, but that sort of thing still bugs me. You cannot ID a guy in 30 seconds with a 3D laser scan of his skull. At least I hope you can't. Anyway, MacNamara's a rich dude, so stealing a bunch of paintings doesn't make sense. The team checks out his house and finds that he only drove the getaway car because the real thieves had kidnapped his daughter.

Ed tracks down the bad guys, but when the team gets to them, they've both been shot. A little detective work shows that the gallery owner lied about what was taken. In addition to some cheap reprints, the bad guys also swiped some originals that the gallery owner's grandfather stole the day the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor (forget it, I'm rolling). To keep the family secret, the owner pays someone off and recovers the stolen art. BUT, since the bad guys are already dead, there's some question as to who actually got the money. Conveniently, he left a single fingerprint on one of the paintings. A quick search shows that it was Ed! Dun dun dunnnn! He killed the robbers and extorted money from the owner. His "I'm just a befuddled old man" act doesn't work, so he leads the team on a wild goose chase for the kidnapped daughter so he'll have the opportunity to kill himself before he has to go back to prison. So, over the course of ten minutes, three bad dudes are dead, and one gallery owner's going down for obstruction. Justice works fast in Hawaii. A little too fast if you ask me. That's a lot of plot to get through over the course of one and a half acts, and it really felt rushed. I've watched it twice and I still have no idea why Ed decided to track the robbers down himself and kill them.

Even the power of a fully-loaded semi could barely stop Ed Asner.

With Ed dead, they have no leads until Kono runs tracks down a car one of the dead guys rented. It's in a large, long-term parking lot near the airport. A manual search will require time the girl doesn't have, so they call in a favour and use satellite tracking to find her. They save the girl, reunite her with her mom, and everyone is happy. Except Chin, because his wife is still dead. And McGarrett, because he's having mommy issues.

Everyone is happy. Almost.

Yes, mommy issues. While all this has been going on, Catherine has been off tracking down Mrs. McGarrett for Steve. As it turns out, the best way to do this is to put on some jorts and play pool with a WitSec agent. She hacks his account and finds that Mommy McG is still on Oahu. She never even left the island. Dun dun dunnnnn... dunnnnnnn!

Dat ass?

What I Liked
-Ed Asner plays a good old guy. He's had a lot of practice, since he's been doing it for about 40 years now.
-Good in-car banter between Steve, Danny, and Ed Asner. Danny has to sit in the back, even though it's his car.
-Carlos Bernard played the WitSec agent. Apparently, with Michelle dead, they had to bring in Tony.

What I Hated
-Despite the solemness of the occasion, some of the background extras are smiling pretty widely at Malia's funeral.
-The password to the WitSec guy's account is the street he grew up on. Even crappy website's you'll only ever visit twice make you enter a password so complicated you can't remember it. I don't think a government agency would let you get away with something so cliche.
-The kidnapped girl in the trunk is stashed in a parking lot that covers about five acres. Danny thinks it'll take hours to find manually, so they use magic satellite heat signature tracking to find her. Assuming 10m² per car, and no wasted space, that's a maximum of around 2000 cars. They know the colour(red), make(Nissan), model(Altima), and plate number(KDNPGRL) of the car they're looking for. Even if all the cars were in a single row, they could cruise by at a leisurely 20kph and look at all of them in a mere 15 minutes. Of course, the satellite image shows that there are only about 40 cars in the lot, only one of which is red.

"A manual search will take hours"

Final Thoughts
This one started well, but they jammed way much into the last third of the episode. The forced suspense at the end didn't really do it for me, either. They found the parking lot where the car was in about 30 seconds, I just couldn't buy the idea that the girl was ever in danger.