Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Hawaii Five-0 3x07: Ohuna

Click the image to get the episode.

For once, there hasn't been a murder. Instead, a kid is released from a juvenile detention centre into the loving arms of his celebrity parents. On the way home, their GPS takes them off course, and they're intercepted by a squad of skeleton mask-wearing goons who kidnap the kid and pistol whip Alan Ruck.

Which I think is something we've all wanted to do to one of his characters at some point.

When the team arrives, the parents tell them that their kid was arrested for hacking into the White House database and getting tickets to the correspondents' dinner, and even though they wound up in the middle of nowhere, they were just following the GPS. Kono tries to talk to the couple's other child, and he's repeatedly typing out a licence plate number on his tablet.

So she looks it up using the awesome power of Windows 8

The licence plate belongs to a stolen van that's already been recovered and has just been delivered to the impound lot. Inside, they find the body of the kid, who appears to have died of a heart attack while being tortured.

Since it's now a murder case and not a kidnapping, they can slow down a bit and make jokes. Apparently a missing child is serious business, but a dead one is hilarious. Anyway, while he was in the joint, the kid got a visit from superbad hacker dude, Kong Liang, so Danny takes Steve to meet with his hacker contact, Toast.

Martin Starr's been eating a lot of beef.

Despite his protestations, Steve and Danny wire up toast and send him into Kong's hacker den. He's not terribly happy about it, though, and yells at Steve and Danny over the wire. When the first thing he sees on the inside is Kong breaking a dude's hand with a mallet, he does the smart thing and runs the hell away. Fortunately, Kong only has two guards and his office has easily accessible windows, so they apprehend him without much difficulty. He's not the killer, though.

Kono finds out what the kid's killers were looking for: an encrypted file on his personal storage site. They can't access it though, because the password is 309 digits long and will take infinity billion years to hack. She goes to the kid's house to see if his family knows anything. His parents aren't much help, but his younger brother has memorized a series of elements that apparently correspond to the digits of the password.

I think he's supposed to be a high-functioning autistic.

Before she can relay the number back to headquarters, Kono's phone suddenly cuts out and the house is invaded by the guys in the skeleton masks. Chin sends a uniformed cop over to check things out and he's promptly shot in the leg and then executed.

They get a print off a stolen car and it leads to a private military company called WhiteFire (which is a pretty blatant parody of BlackWater) led by Carlo Rota. Inside the house, Carlo finds Kono and agrees to trade the hostages for an armoured vehicle and the password. It doesn't go well for him as Steve hides on the underside of the vehicle, Chin shoots his men, and Kono beats him up.

Being beaten up by a girl doesn't go over well in prison.

They decrypt the file and it leads them to a mobster who WhiteFire helped break out of prison. Conveniently, he's in Hawaii, so they arrest him. Case closed.

On the home front, Steve finally gets Mary to come back to Hawaii so he can tell her their mother is alive. She brings along an old man in a wheelchair named Morty whose caregiver she is. When Steve tells her, rather than go home, she goes to visit their father's grave and talk about how sad they both were when they thought her mother was dead. Eventually Morty convinces her that getting a second chance is a rare gift, and she goes home to see her mom.

Case closed.

What I Liked
-Steve needs to talk to Mary in private, so she gets Morty to take out his hearing aid. That's a pretty good gag.
-A newly caneless Max struts his way into the examination room. I like Masi Oka, and I wish they'd find a way to use him more.
-Toast reacts the way a normal person would when he's wired up. Regular people should not be totally cool with being sent into dangerous situations with no weapons and no training. Also, it's really kind of a dick move to do that to a guy. Steve and Danny are jerks.
-Shelley Berman as Morty. Even at 87 he seems to be relatively cogent in real life, but he still plays the befuddled old man really well.

What I Hated
-Toast says there's nothing free about free porn. Any real computer expert would know that's completely untrue. Hell, any moderate internet user would know that's completely untrue. In fact, the whole hacking section of the plot seems like it was written by someone whose sole knowledge of computers comes from the movies Hackers and The Net. Did he use a typewriter to write this episode or something?
-The brother recites like ten elements, when in reality he'd have to say more than 100. Also, the last one sounds like Ununtrium, which isn't listed in the book Kono uses to look up the atomic numbers. Everything about that part of the episode is stupid beyond belief.
-Carlo Rota's ludicrous accent. I've seen him play a paramilitary guy before, and he used a stupid accent that time, too. I guess they really like it when he does that.

Final Thoughts
The kids in the episode are clearly not the spawn of blue-eyed Alan Ruck and Melinda McGraw.
He has brown eyes, his parents both have blue eyes. Somebody's got some 'splainin to do.

I looked it up, and this seems like it's the writer's first writing job, so I highly doubt that he's a 90-year-old man. So, that makes me wonder why all the technical stuff is such gibberish. Computers are not magic boxes, and anyone under the age of 60 should know that. I really tried to get past it, but it's as if the episode was written by someone whose knowledge of computers has all been gleaned from comic books and bad movies. Or maybe there's an edict at CBS that says all computer-related writing needs to be goddamn stupid.

The last few episodes have been pretty dark and serious, so I was hoping for something a little bit more fun. This episode almost delivered, but it was still kinda serious and the parts that were supposed to be fun were way too stupid.

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