Hawaii Five-0 3x21: Imi Loko Ka 'Uhane

Aisha Tyler is a talk show host who's filming in Hawaii for a week, and the Governor has decided to allow her to tail the Five-0 team. They're not particularly happy about it, though. McGarrett blows her off, Danno tells her to keep the camera out of his face, Kono just walks away, and Chin says he's very busy but answers a couple questions and says that if he weren't a cop, he'd be playing jazz trumpet.

Like Miles Davis, only not as good.

She lucks out and they catch a case right away. Steve makes sure that she and her crew all sign personal injury waivers before they go, because they just might be entering the danger zone. They race to a crime scene where they find a body so badly mutilated that they can't tell if it's a man or a woman.

Since Max happens to be a big fan of Aisha's show, she gets him to wear a tiny camera when he goes to examine the body. It's a guy, but he's been chopped up pretty good with his face destroyed and both hands chopped off to prevent identification. McGarrett spies the camera and tosses it back in across the police line; apparently he's okay with being filmed, but only from a distance. Which is lucky because while he's busy standing around watching Max work, Aisha is interviewing a familiar member of the HPD.

Dude's got some brass ones.

When he notices Aisha delaying an officer, Steve walks over to complain, but quickly spots Wo Fat, and a gun fight ensues. Since he's a slick mofo, he gets away without scratch.

An analysis of the video that Aisha's crew has been shooting shows that Wo Fat arrived just before the Five-0 team did, so he's not the killer. To gain further insight, Danny and Steve head over to the ME's office, where Max is camera-ready.

The ascot was a bit much.

There's nothing that'll help ID the body. Whoever chopped his hands off was a pro and even removed the skin on his arm to get rid of an identifying mark. Investigative work points to a Russian hitman who just flew into the island, and who's inexplicably still there. Unfortunately, when Danny and Steve bust into his hotel room, he's not there. He is, however, out in the hall, so McGarrett chases him down and dives off a third floor balcony into the hotel pool to catch him.

His form was good, but his entry was a bit messy... I give it an 8.5

Russian guy was surveilling the dead dude, but he has an alibi, so he's not the killer. They have an identity for the body now, though, and they check out his apartment. It's been tossed. His girlfriend's staying at a nearby hotel, and she tells them that someone broke in a couple days ago, he left her at a hotel, then she never saw him again. She also confirms that he had a tattoo on his right arm. Danny and Steve track down the artist who says he gave away the stencil he used to a cop who looked surprisingly like Wo Fat. Luckily, the tattoo parlour has surveillance cameras, and they got a good shot of the stencil.

It kinda looks like a girl I used to know.

Kono performs some fancy computer magic and determines that the bottom of the tattoo contains a map that matches up with some trails through a mountain range on the leeward coast. However, it's a huge area and they have no idea what they're looking for, so the map isn't really much help.

Later, they get a call from the Secret Service. It turns out the dead guy worked for the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. He stole a set of master plates for the US $100 bill and used a 3D printer to copy them. Further interrogation of the dude's girlfriend leads the team to believe that her brother might have shot him and then gone to find the plates himself. And find them he did, about five minutes before Wo Fat found him and shot him in the head. When the team finds his body it's still warm, and they manage to track Wo Fat for a short distance before they spy him escaping in a helicopter.

"Later, suckers!"

Apparently, he's a crap lousy pilot, and the team manages to shoot him down. When they check the wreckage, he's not there, but he's really close and manages to put two bullets into Chin's vest. He's heavily outgunned, though, and the firefight doesn't last long. Suffering from severe burns from the crash and a bullet wound to the chest, Wo Fat asks McGarrett to finish him, but he won't do it. They get him to the hospital where he pulls through.

Steve's not happy about it.

What I Liked
-Fong's face when the cameras show up.

He's not as camera-ready as Max was.

-Aisha catches Danny and Steve bickering in the car. Now the whole world can know about their ball busting.

What I Hated
-Aisha Tyler as the master of exposition. Why show things happening on screen when you can just have someone talk about them later?
-Damned shakycam for a good chunk of the episode. Were I prone to doing so, I might have vomited.
-A really bad cut when they switched from Alex O'Loughlin to his stunt double when McGarrett jumps out the hotel window into the pool. It looked like they tried to hide it, but they failed pretty badly.
-Wo Fat went down in a really weird way. He was escaping in a helicopter, then conveniently flew right in front of the team's line of sight and hovered there while they shot at him.

Final Thoughts
This was not a good episode. It had most of the trappings of a good episode: Bickering... bikini babes... Wo Fat, but framing them with a talk show was a really dumb idea. Maybe the cast needed a little more time off or something like that; I don't know. What I do know is that the portions of the episode that focussed on Aisha Tyler were interminable. Which is actually fairly realistic, since I can't stand daytime talk shows.

I'm also not a big fan of shaky camera work, which this episode had in spades. It was annoying, headache inducing, and may have made some people physically ill. If the best thing you can say about an episode is that it didn't quite make you throw up, that's not exactly a ringing endorsement.

Nevertheless, it did have the aforementioned good bits. If they could re-edit the episode to excise most of the talk show portion, it would actually be pretty good. I don't know if this technically counts as a gimmick episode, but I think I'll call it one. Trying out new things is admirable in today's play-it-safe television climate, but Hawaii Five-0's been doing it a lot lately, and they've pretty much failed every time. The show's been renewed, which gives them some leeway to do stuff they wouldn't normally do, but since it really hasn't worked out, they should probably try to stick with what works more often next season. And, damn it, Danno needs to book someone again!