Hawaii Five-0 3x12: Kapu

A pledge for fictional fraternity Beta Phi Tau at fictional O'ahu State University comes across a body dissolving in a vat of acid. To his credit, he doesn't puke immediately, despite having consumed 64 shots of beer as part of an initiation ritual.

Really, that'd probably make me barf, and I'm sober.

Danny, Steve, and Danny's visiting nephew, Eric are soon on the scene. The dead guy is a professor, and whoever killed him had keycard access to his lab... which narrows it down to about 300 suspects. Dead guy's TA says he'd been acting strange recently, and the chair of his department thinks he might have been offering his female students a little private tutoring, if you know what I mean.

After a little investigative work, they find that the dead professor's been threatened by one of his female students, and Steve and Danno head over to her sorority to check her out. Eric stays behind in the sorority house living room to check out the rest of the ladies.

Eh..... not bad.

When the guys get up to the girl's room, she bolts out the window and jumps on her scooter, and so begins the slowest chase scene this show has ever had. Eventually, they grab her, and when they interrogate her, they find that she ran because she bought some meds off a friend to help her study because half her chem class is buying the test papers in advance.

Eric uses his immense cheating experience to help the guys track down one of the students, and he points them directly to the dead prof's TA.

He's gonna be an internet meme.

The TA swears he didn't do it, and he wasn't worried about getting busted for selling the tests because he was the one writing them in the first place.

A thorough examination of the dead guy's house turns up a hidden grow-op, but it wasn't the sticky icky, but rather a plant that was thought to be extinct. He'd been booking regular hunting trips to the island of Niihau, a privately-owned nature preserve in the north. The locals saw him split off from his hunting parties and smoke coming from somewhere off in the distance. Smoke that is currently emanating from that exact spot, despite the fact that the professor is dead.

Back on Oahu, Danny and Eric go to find Toast to see if he can dig anything up on the dead guy's computer. Unfortunately, Toast is in Baltimore for his sister's Bat Mitzvah, so they have to deal with his roommate, Bullwinkle, who is smoking weed from a bong made out of a pineapple.

It gives the smoke a delightful island flavour.

Out in the jungle, Chin and McGarrett find a botanist played by Jeff Fahey, who was on Lost for a while. His son has a degenerative disorder, but the nearly-extinct plant might hold the key to finding a cure. Dead guy was a chemical genius, and he was helping out before he was murdered. While they're checking out the guy's operation, Steve gets a call from Danny. Bullwinkle has worked his magic, and they know who killed the professor. My money was on Gilligan.

The identity of the killer was decided via Twitter, so depending on where you were, it was either the department chair, the TA, or the random kid they caught cheating. In any case, he's on Niihau and Chin shoots him just before he can take out the botanist and steal all the research data for himself.

Twitter should not decide anything. Anything.

Elsewhere, everyone's favourite recurring prisoner, Sang is in town to testify in exchange for a sentence reduction, and Kono gets to babysit him. He has expensive food delivered to their hotel room and gets Kamekona to bring him a new suit, all at taxpayer expense. He escapes while the prosecutor's helping to prepare his testimony and Kono's out of the room.

However, he didn't bust out so he could get away, he just wanted to see his ex-wife again. When he gets to her house, he finds her having dinner with her new man, and he's so despondent that he can't even bring himself to knock on the door. Kono catches up with him and he lets her take him back in. But, she's not made of stone, and she offers to pull some strings to get him transferred back to a prison on the island. I hope that means we'll be seeing more of him.

What I Liked
-Sang. He's the best recurring guest character they've had, aside from Larisa Oleynik and her butt.

Show Sang some love, girl.

-Eric emails a photo of Danny in the 1998 Newark Police Academy calendar to everyone in Danny's address book. If you want to piss off your uncle, that's a good way to go.
-Eric's solution to the slow speed chase is for Danny to shoot out the girl's tires. This kid's growing on me.
-Bullwinkle has a lot of ranch dressing... Because it's delicious. The man knows what's up.

What I Hated
-Twitter decided the ending.

Final Thoughts
This was a perfectly serviceable episode, except for the ending. That was some Grade A, industrial strength BS. The motive was the same for all three guys, including the student, who they admitted would have no idea what to do with the research data, so the professor was essentially murdered by a random opportunist. Sure, that's how things go in real life sometimes, but it doesn't make for compelling television. Especially since the department chair isn't seen again after the ten-minute mark of the episode, and the student only has about 30 seconds of screen time before the killer is revealed. From a narrative perspective, it makes no sense for either of those guys to be the murderer, but in the version I saw, it turned out it was the chair. I really hope the ratings for this episode were in the toilet so stuff like this doesn't catch on.

Of course, there's no way to tell if the Twitter votes actually influenced the ending in any way. It's perfectly conceivable that CBS just picked one version at random. That'd be a big deal over in the UK, but here in North America, I don't think anyone would actually care.

Leaving all that garbage aside, the episode was decent. Eric turned out to be better than I initially expected, they brought back Sang, and Bullwinkle offered Danny a hit from his pineapple bong. That's the kind of stuff I want to see on Hawaii Five-0, not stupid stunts to try to get publicity and goose the ratings. I like this show, and I want to see it continue, but not like this.