Hawaii Five-0 3x16: Kekoa

Four women are at a strip club for a bachelorette party, and you just know it's not going to end well for them. Surprisingly, they all make it out of the club alive, but it's not all shots and strippers for them. As they get in their car to drive to the next club, they're broadsided by a speeding car. They're all right, however the guy in the trunk of the other car isn't so lucky. The driver and his passenger get out and put a couple bullets in his chest and run off.

It's not a party until someone ends up dead.

Fong runs a partial print from the murder weapon and comes up with a match to everyone's favourite confidential informant, Kamekona. The big guy says he had nothing to do with it; the man in the trunk was his cousin and the only one who believed he could turn his life around when he got out of prison. The gun was one he gave him for protection not long ago. Kamekona claims not to know what his cousin was protecting himself from, but Steve and Danny know he's hiding something. They hang back and watch while the big man pulls out a big gun and shuts down his shrimp truck so he can go kill a guy.

Danny and Steve follow him to the home of the brother of a guy who tried to rob his cousin a year ago. He claims he was just going to scare him and make a citizen's arrest. The guys tell him how stupid that is and put him on shrimp truck lockdown until they close the case. When he's gone, they bust into the guy's house and check it out. He's not home, but Danny finds a camera with pictures of the dead guy on it, and McGarrett finds a log book that details his comings and goings over the past few weeks. As they're getting ready to leave, they hear the brother roll up on his bike. He tries to get away, but McGarrett clubs him in the chest with a lawn gnome and arrests him.

Farewell, Chucky. We hardly knew ye.

Back at Five-0 headquarters, the idiot brother says he just wanted to rob the guy's tuna market. Some of those fish go for big bucks and if the guy hadn't gotten himself killed, he would've been set for life.

Chin pulls surveillance video from the market and finds that the guy was kidnapped at 9:15, but didn't turn up dead until 2:45. That's a long time to drive around with a guy in your trunk.

While they're trying to figure out just what was going on, some info comes back from HPD that tells them the guy's daughter, Summer Glau, lied to them when they questioned her. Chin and Kono pick her up and bring her in for a little quality time.

She's not too happy about it.

Summer's not going to talk until they bring in her uncle Kamekona and he gives her a hug. He convinces her that the Five-0 team are good people and she should help them find her father's killer. She tells him that her father was an olohe: a master of the Hawaiian martial art Kapu Kuʻialua. He was old-school and thought that the training should only be done in secret, and that's why she refused to say anything. But, when Chin and Kono tell her that Max's autopsy showed that her father was severely beaten before he was murdered, she takes them to her father's training compound.

They're pretty hardcore.

There are a couple dozen tough, burly dudes at the compound, but Summer assures the team that none of them could've taken her father in a fight, so they're back to square one.

Fortunately, Kamekona's been busy. He flashed a surveillance photo of the kidnappers around town and one of them was identified as a female MMA fighter. McGarrett and Danny check her out and discover that she's staying at a hotel on the island. She's not there when they bust down her door, but they find some disturbing video on her computer. Her accomplice has been running a secret, underground fight ring for rich spectators, and the video shows him beating the crap out of the dead guy. Before he was dead, of course.

Danny discovers a $500,000 wire transfer into the MMA chick's account, and they realize that the first fight was just the undercard. The main event is a fight between her and Summer. Chin calls her, but it's too late. She takes a cattle prod to the back, and it's lights out.

Down goes Summer! Down goes Summer! Down goes Summer!

When she wakes up, she finds out that her father's protege sold both of them out because her father was too bound to tradition and wasn't interested in making money. He tosses her in an empty swimming pool with the MMA chick while twenty or so rich people cheer him on. The fight, however, does not go as he intended. Summer may be tiny, but she's a master of both lua and waif-fu, and she kicks the crap out of the other girl. Which leaves the protege no other choice but to dive in and finish her himself. She puts up a valiant effort, but he's much bigger than her, and he takes her down pretty easily. He's about to finish her when McGarrett strolls in to save the day. Steve shoots the bad guy in the knee while the rest of the team arrests everybody.

Summer gets taken to the hospital where Kamekona sits by her side and nurses her back to health. Her father was always their for him, so he's always going to be there for her.

Case closed.

In a subplot, McGarrett visits his old navy intel pal Treat Williams to get him to run recon and surveillance on his mother. Treat starts off by following her in the grocery store, but she makes him pretty quickly and he acts like he was just trying to pick her up. At first she shoots him down, but Treat's a charming guy, and she hasn't been on a date in 20 years.

Life's a treat.

They go to lunch, where she tells him everything she knows about wine, and he tells her that he's the Fabric King of Ohio. Which I suppose is a little better than being the Sausage King of Chicago. I'm not buying it, though. There's no way he's going to end up spying on her. And he doesn't. Instead, while they're offscreen, they realize that they have great chemistry and a lot in common, so he comes clean and they decide to go on a real date.

Steve's a bit dumbfounded by the whole thing.

What I Liked
-Since he's going to be running surveillance 24-7, Treat tells Steve there's a good chance he'll see his mother naked. You should always give a friend a heads-up when there's a chance you might see his mom naked.
-Danny hurts Kamekona's feelings when he mentions that regular handcuffs aren't going to do the job on him. It's true, but it's still not nice to call a man fat to his face.
-Chin and Steve both know the first rule of Fight Club. I was surprised when I learned how poorly that film did in the theatres. It had some truly iconic lines.
-The bad guy pulls a blade and starts twirling it around, so McGarrett finishes him off Indiana Jones style.

"No ticket."

What I Hated
-Summer Glau's character is supposed to be 21. I don't care how tiny she is, she doesn't look 21 anymore.
-There was never any danger of Treat running real surveillance on mama McGarrett. I'm glad they didn't have her do the whole "I knew you were a spook the whole time" thing, but they still dragged it out a little too much.

Final Thoughts
I really appreciate that they took the time to build up to catching the bad guy. It wasn't some dude who they interviewed five minutes into the episode and then forgot about for forty minutes. They didn't spend quite enough time on the dead guy's hidden life as a martial artist, but they still did a pretty good job of revealing things as the show went on.

After she walked out at the end, I took a moment to look up a little more information on Christine Lahti. She's 62! I don't know what she's doing or which deity she made a pact with, but she looks really good for her age.

Overall, this was a fun episode. There was a random bikini girl, some good banter, a little shooting, a little fighting, and even a bit of a car chase. Once again, Danno didn't get to do any booking, though, so I can't give it top marks.