Hawaii Five-0 3x18: Na Kiʻi

There's a tiny brown dude being chased down some stairs by a white guy with a mullet. Is this the latest incident of racial violence on the streets of Honolulu? No, it's just Dog the Bounty Hunter doing some bounty hunting. The chase goes well and Dog tackles the guy onto the hood of someone's car, but just as he's about to cuff him, an unexpected visitor decides to drop in.

Unannounced guests are so inconsiderate.

Elsewhere, McGarrett is rowing and bickering with his mother when he gets the call about the dead girl. Max's first impression was that she committed suicide, but on closer investigation it appears that she was trying to fight the fall and was suffering from several unrelated contusions and hematomas. When he gets her on the slab, he finds out that she was given a lethal dose of GHB 6-8 hours before her death, which probably caused her to become disoriented and fall off her balcony.

The first suspect is her surfer ex-boyfriend; he has an alibi and has no idea what caused all her bruising. A ticket stub in her pocket leads to a local rec centre where Danny and McGarrett discover her terrible secret:

She had a really stupid name... and she was a Derby Girl.

While her choice of leisure activities explains the bruising, it doesn't explain how or why someone doped her up. To get that information, someone from the Five-0 team will have to go undercover in the exciting world of roller derby, just like on that episode of Bones that I saw part of a while ago. With Dicey Hot dead, The Diamond Dolls need a new jammer, and as it just so happens, Catherine used to be a figure skater, so she's the girl for the job. She goes to the try-outs where she does well, but finishes second. Even though she's very proud of herself, Steve subscribes to the 'win at all costs' mentality and he needed her on that team. So, he has the girl who finished first arrested for unpaid parking tickets, and Cat is the world's newest Derby Girl.

The star on her helmet means she's the jammer. Having that knowledge makes me sad.

Cat bonds with a fellow Diamond Doll named Crimson Bride who points out a skeevy guy she should stay away from. A little facial-recognition magic back at Five-0 headquarters reveals that the guy is a low-level bookie who's been taking bets on roller derby matches. The guys go to pick him up and he bolts so McGarrett tackles him into the ocean. He admits to trying to bribe the dead girl to take a dive in the championship, but she turned him down and he has an alibi, so he couldn't have killed her.

Crimson Bride points Catherine at a girl on the opposing squad named Sugar Stix. Danny and Steve go to talk to her and put the screws to her. She says that the dead girl was the team's golden girl and the coach's favourite, so maybe one of the other Diamond Dolls killed her. Steve has Catherine track down a list of the girls' real names so they can run background checks on all of them. She sneaks into the coach's office and copies his hard drive before the match; Crimson catches her, but she plays it off like she was just looking for a knee brace. Catherine gets away clean, however Crimson is not so lucky. The coach sees her coming out of his office then notices someone's been messing with his computer, and he is not a happy camper.

He's a snappy dresser, though.

During the match, the coach somehow talks one of the opposing players into injuring Crimson, then forces her to sit out until she agrees to go to his office for a cortisone shot.

Back at headquarters, the rest of the team finds a series of photos on the coach's hard drive that show a bunch of semi-nude, drugged up girls.

That's not cortisone he's been giving them!

In his office, the coach pistol whips Crimson and ties her to a chair so he can interrogate her and find out what she knows about his skuzzy porn operation. Luckily, Catherine figures out that something's not right and she busts through the door and puts one in his shoulder before he can do any more harm. Danny and Steve arrive moments later to take him in, and the day is saved.

Case closed.

Meanwhile, someone breaks into Doris' house and steals her safe. At first she doesn't want to tell her son what happened, but he gets all shouty and she tells him the safe contained an unredacted microfiche that she was going to use as leverage in case anyone came after her or her family. Now she's screwed and has to call in a favour from some old CIA buddies.

What I Liked
-Dog's scream as he's chasing the guy down some stairs is pretty hilarious. I think he should give up the whole bounty hunting thing and start acting full time.
-Steve gets a little "What's in the box"-y when he asks Doris who robbed her house. Not quite as funny as when Brad Pitt did it, but still pretty good.

What I Hated
-Doris beats the crap out of the burglar, hip tosses him onto a coffee table and breaks a vase over his head, and not only does he not stay down, but he gets right back up and beats her by smacking her head into the wall. I'm not sure what's more ridiculous: That a 62-year-old woman beat up a much younger and larger man, or that she went down so easily when he retaliated.
-Danny and Steve bust in on Sugar Stix while she's with a patient. Yes, they're investigating a murder, but that's a serious misuse of their authority and a really dick move on top of that.

Final Thoughts
I feel bad for the poor extra/stunt woman who played the dead girl. She had to lie semi-nude on what must have been a very cold table while Masi Oka painted her blue.

This is her before the painting started, so you can tell how cold it was.

Why is roller derby a thing all of a sudden? It was in an episode of Bones a while back, it's on H50 now, and I even almost went out with someone who turned out to be a Derby Girl late last year. Plus there was that Ellen Page movie a few years back. I thought it had more or less died out as a sport in the late 1980s, so it's a bit weird to see it everywhere these days.

Although he didn't really do much and was almost completely unrelated to the plot, I thought Dog did pretty well, and I wouldn't mind seeing him show up in a more pronounced role. Maybe put him on the trail of Sang Min or something like that. They could even do a crossover with his new show on CMT.

They've been starting a lot of plot threads on this show that don't seem to be amounting to much of anything. Wo Fat is still running around, Sang is on the loose, Doris is up to some CIA stuff, and Kono's had a clone of Adam's phone for like two months. There are only about five episodes left this season, so I'm a little concerned that things might feel a bit rushed towards the end.

Despite all the derbying, I didn't think there was a whole lot to this episode; it only fulfilled one of the three Bs. Nevertheless, it had some good bits, and although the killer's motive was a bit out of left field, at least the killer himself had a significant presence in the episode rather than just being some random guy who got 30 seconds of screen time. So, overall it was okay, but not great.