Hawaii Five-0 3x20: Olelo Pa'a

Steve and Catherine are in South Korea, exchanging some North Korean prisoners for the body of a dead US soldier. It's taken three years and intervention from the highest levels of government to get the body back, and the North Koreans wonder why the US would exchange so much for one body, but McGarrett's not saying.

When we come back after the credits, it's 2000 again and Joe White is training Navy SEALs, including McGarrett and some other guy. In the middle of the night, the other guy gets up so he can quit the program, which is done by ringing a bell three times. He gets off two rings before McGarrett tackles him from behind. It turns out they're friends and the previous Thanksgiving the guy's dad told Steve that his proudest moment was when his son signed up for SEAL training.

Aw crap, now I have to finish training.

After that, he became the most badass, hardcore soldier there was. But then McGarrett took a mission from a CIA guy to capture Victor Hesse's brother in Korea, and got him killed. Three years later, the US government finally managed to recover his body, except when Steve cracks open the casket to say his goodbyes, he finds that it's not his friend, but some other guy. Immediately before they parachuted into the DPRK, his friend knocked up his girlfriend, married her, and got her name tattooed on his arm. The body in the casket is missing that tattoo.

Steve immediately starts planning an unauthorized mission into North Korea to retrieve his friend's body from where he left it. Catherine convinces him to let her come along, and McGarrett calls in a favour from Joe White and Jimmy Buffett. Jimmy's helicopter wasn't in the budget this week, but he gets Steve and Cat a cache of weapons and gives them a ride to a secret smugglers' road that goes across the border. Once they're across, McGarrett recognizes one of the smugglers who killed his friend in a firefight three years previously. He and Cat hijack the guy's car with the intent of getting him to take them to where the body's buried. But the guy bails out and the car crashes into a tree.

Always buckle up, kids.

They recover quickly and manage to recapture the guy, and fortunately, he can still remember where the body is. Steve gets him to dig it up and discovers that the body was mutilated before it was buried. After getting the guy to admit who ordered the mutilation, McGarrett booby-traps the guy with a grenade and then he and Cat head down the road to kill the guy who gave the order. Unfortunately, they're greatly outnumbered and they get captured fairly quickly. Fortunately, the smugglers' boss is an idiot who immediately has his captives untied. The grenade trap goes off, and the distraction is enough for Steve and Catherine to grab some guns and shoot everybody. They somehow manage to recover the body and take it back to Hawaii for burial.

Case closed... I guess.

What I Liked
-CIA Agent Robert Picardo. I like the stereotypical shadowy, smoking guy who doesn't tell you his name.

Drinking on the job probably isn't the best idea.

What I Hated
-McGarrett of 2000 looks exactly the same as McGarrett of today, just with slightly shorter hair. It didn't even look like they tried to make him look younger.
-The chief smuggler was the biggest idiot in history. TV villains have severe intelligence issues, but this guy really pushed it to a new level. He untied the people who, just minutes earlier were trying to kill all his men.
-There's no indication of how Steve and Catherine actually got the body back over the border. It was a long walk through the jungle to get where they were, did McGarrett throw the corpse over his shoulder or something?

Final Thoughts
This was a bad episode, and I really didn't like it. It had none of the things that make Hawaii Five-0 watchable, and a whole bunch of pointless, stupid crap. My guess is that this episode was designed to give half the regular cast a little bit of a break, since they're only in the episode for two short scenes. It suffered because of that. All the stuff that makes this show fun is due to the characters and the setting. Ignoring half the cast and setting the episode in Korea was just a recipe for disaster.