Hawaii Five-0 3x19: Hoa Pili

It's a full moon, and sea-based shenanigans are afoot. A man boards a yacht three miles off the coast of O'ahu and draws a fairly large handgun; he's clearly intent on putting a big hole in someone. Who that someone is becomes quite clear when he walks into the bedroom and finds his best friend putting something in his wife's big hole.

Or the little one, I'm not 100% sure.

Buddy boy is about to get a bullet in the brain when another yacht explodes off in the distance. That seems to be enough to stop the man from his murderous quest because in the morning he's wearing a set of HPD handcuffs and the Five-0 team is investigating the explosion.

As it turns out, the boat belonged to a company that takes people out to swim with the sharks and its the third one they've lost in the past month. The owner's surprised that it was out at sea since it was supposed to be docked all night. It also looks like his brother's missing, so he gets the team to head out on the water to see if they can find him. Danny spots some sharks circling where the boat's shark cage was supposed to be, and when they haul it up, they find the brother's body inside.

He doesn't look so good.

The team asks around and they find out that the dead brother was recently involved in an altercation on the high seas with a member of the Kapu Surf Club. Danny and Steve head over to talk to the Kapu Capo, but when they get there his house is engulfed in flames.

Which are pretty much the worst things you can be engulfed in.

Danny thinks the fire might have been in retaliation for one of the Kapu guys beating up up the dead brother, so the head Kapu asks his boys what happened. One of them cops to the beating, but says he was on a different island at the time of the murder. The guys believe him, and take him in on the assault charge, promising to let him go if his alibi checks out.

Back at Five-0 headquarters, the guys question the living brother after his fingerprints turn up on a discarded gas can near the fire. He and the Kapu don't like each other, but their alibis all checked out, so they didn't kill his brother. Also, someone drops by to say hi to Chin:

I knew I smelled a prison romance.

Leilani's there to see why Chin never asked her out. He tells her that he'd like to take her out, but he's still not over Malia's death. She leaves him her number and tells her to call her when he's ready. Then he gets called to the lab where Kono and Fong have a demonstration for him.

Charlie's been over the crime scene photos and he's figured out how the arsonists have been causing the fires on the boats. An automatic pet food dispenser dumped chlorine tablets into a dish full of brake fluid. The timer goes off, the tablets hit the fluid, and poof: Green Screen Explosion!

It probably doesn't work in real life, so don't bother trying it at home, kids.

The setup is similar to one that was used in a fire started at a construction site two years ago. The HPD had a suspect, but couldn't link him to the fire. The detectives haven't questioned him about the shark boat fires, so Chin tracks him down for a little chat. Unwisely, the guy bolts; as Chris Rock once so astutely stated: If the Five-0 have to come and get you, they're bringin' an ass-kicking with 'em.

If your day involves flying over the hood of a car into a rack of roasted ducks, you did something wrong.

When Chin and Kono finally slap the cuffs on the guy, a van pulls up and a couple dudes with guns hop out. After a brief standoff, one dude pulls out a badge and tells them that they're FBI agents and the guy's working for them as an informant. They know he burned the first two boats, but they let him walk free so they could keep using him. The team takes him in anyway, because if he burned the third one, he's a murderer and that's more important to them than the FBI's RICO case. Unfortunately, the guy's alibi checks out, so they have to cut him loose.

Meanwhile, Max summons Danny and Steve to his office, where he has a nice big mako shark on his table. Normally, he doesn't deal in fish, but when the fishermen who caught it were gutting it, they found an arm in its stomach. DNA from the arm matches it to some blood spatter found on the third boat. No one's been into any of the local ERs with a missing arm lately, though, so that particular suspect is probably dead. However, a one-armed man wouldn't have been able to toss the dead brother into the shark cage, so there's still another killer out there. A quick search brings up a list of known associates, but when they bust into a house looking for answers, all they find are more questions.

Oh, and a dead guy. They found a dead guy, too.

A more thorough search of the house turns up an oyster sauce barrel that used to contain a large quantity of MDMA. Some Taiwanese drug smugglers were caught flying into O'ahu a few days prior, but when the DEA searched their plane, it was empty. McGarrett figures the killers saw them ditch their cargo in the ocean and killed the dead brother when they went to retrieve it. He also guesses that the third guy they're looking for killed his partners so he could get away with 100% of the profit.

The team catches the guy just as he's about to make the deal, but then they get caught by the drugs' original owners. The head smuggler is about to lock Chin, Danny, and Steve in a shipping container and send them on a slow boat to China, and gut he killer for his insolence when Kono uses a crane to drop another container on his head.

It's a shame she had to do that. He was wearing a very nice suit.

A thrilling fight scene ensues where all the smugglers are beaten or killed and McGarrett takes out the killer with a stack of water barrels. When they get him back to headquarters, the get him to admit to killing his friends and the brother, and, in a cruel twist, they tell him it was all for nothing because the drugs were tainted during production and were worthless.

Kono and Steve help the surviving brother make repairs to his damaged boat, Danny and Chin help the Kapu rebuild their house, and Kamekona gets his helicopter pilot's licence. The big guy takes Max, Danny, and Steve up on his inaugural flight and shows them the sights.

Case Closed.

What I Liked
-Danny gives Steve crap about helping Kamekona get his helicopter pilot's licence. They haven't had enough in-car banter on this show lately.
-Chin says the brake fluid-chlorine explosion probably voids the pet food dispenser's warranty.

Kono liked that one, too.

-Steve and Kono both know more about the Sub-Mariner than Danny does. I never thought I'd see the day when a TV show would make a Namor reference.
-The show ends with the guys in the helicopter singing the Magnum P.I. theme song.

Did you see the sunrise this morning?

What I Hated
-The brother commits arson without being seen, but leaves his gas can behind. Criminals are extra stupid on TV.
-The previews for the episode relied heavily on the line "We're looking for a one-armed perp." They actually discount that theory about three seconds after McGarrett broaches it. I hate misleading previews so very, very much.
-Steve has Kono book the bad guy. No. Just no.
-Twist at the end with the drugs being worthless. It's weird when shows feel like it's not enough to bust a guy for murder, and they also need him to be really depressed about what he's done.

Final Thoughts
Why didn't the surviving brother end up in prison? He admitted to committing arson at the home of someone who had nothing to do with the murder of his brother. For that matter, why did the FBI let the guy who burned the brothers' boats walk around burning more stuff? It looks like arsonists get to walk free in Hawaii.

That whole FBI informant plot both came out of and went nowhere. I do hope it comes up again later in the season, otherwise it was just really weird.

It's been 25 years since it ended, so maybe it's time to remake Magnum P.I., too. Television producers are almost completely bereft of ideas at this point, so if they're going to bring back every popular hour-long drama (Hawaii Five-0, 90210, Dallas, etc.) then they might as well bring back another one that has a dude hanging out with chicks in bikinis and driving a cool car.

This episode was a tad convoluted to say the least, but it still had some fun bits and it very nearly had the three Bs, so I have to give it some points for that.