Hawaii Five-0 3x22: Ho' opio

A girl sits at a table, listening to music and writing in her diary. Then she hears a noise and stands up and we see that she's chained to the wall. An unknown man unlocks the room from the outside and shoves a younger girl in. Looks like a kidnapping.

Later, at Kamekona's Sumo Smash-em Challenge, Catherine, Chin, Kono, and Danny bust Steve's balls over his new, shorter haircut. I guess Alex O'Loughlin's hair didn't grow back fast enough after they shaved it two episodes ago. Although I'm not sure why they bothered to mention it. Anyway, it's a fun event, and they watch a very little woman beat Kamekona's cousin and win a free dinner.

Free shrimp for the shrimpy woman.

Then it's work time. McGarrett gets a phone call and the gang has to head out to the woods. There they find the older girl from the opening teaser shot in the back and dumped in a shallow grave. Max's autopsy indicates that she had been chained up for years and a search of the missing persons database matches her fingerprints to a girl who went missing in 2003.

Magic age-progression software confirms it's the same girl.

A hair on the body matches the recently-kidnapped younger girl, so Danny and Steve head over to her house to talk to her parents. While they're there, a motorcycle club that devotes their spare time to helping track down missing children rides up and the leader gives McGarrett his card. A short time later, Chin gets a call about a suspicious van that was parked outside the younger girl's house before the kidnapping, and Danny tells the boys to keep an eye out. They spot it pretty quickly and Danno gets them to follow it while he and Steve catch up.

They keep up with him, but they're not exactly inconspicuous.

Unfortunately, when the cops get there, the girl's not in the van. Danny goes a little bit nuts during the interrogation, so Steve sends him away, and he goes to visit Grace at cheerleading practice. Back at Five-0 headquarters, Chin finds out that the van guy's just a burglar and not a kidnapper. Fortunately, he has some traffic cam footage that leads them to the home of a woman who was driving around the girl's neighbourhood, pretending to be a cop. But, when they bust down her door, she paints the wall with her brains before they get a chance to grab her.

Well, I guess it's more blood than brains.

A search of her phone records leads them to a guy at the department of records who's been creating fake IDs for kidnapped children. Both the dead girl and the recently-kidnapped one were given the identities of children of a couple on the island, who used the older girl to collect welfare benefits. But they've seen on the news that the jig is up, and when the team busts down their door, the girl is gone.

Her lunch is still there, though.

The wife doesn't know where she is, but when Steve shows her a picture of the dead girl, she tells him that her husband took the live one somewhere and hid her until the heat dies down. He knows he's busted and won't give up any information, so McGarrett takes Danny's badge away and lets him beat it out of him. She's buried in a box out by the highway. The cops dig her up, and she's reunited with her family.

Case Closed.

Meanwhile, Kono's finally getting around to seeing what the hell is up with Adam. She hasn't heard from him in a while, and he's not responding to her calls or texts, so she heads over to his place to see what she can find. He's not home, so being both his girlfriend and a cop, she searches his office. While she's doing that, two guys drop by the house to find him. After a brief stand-off, everyone drops their weapons and the dudes ask Kono if Adam went to see Sato. She has no idea who that is, so they leave and tell her to tell him his brother's looking for him.

Later, she gets Catherine to run a check to see if she can find out who Sato is. It turns out that not only is he a high-ranking member of the Yakuza, but Adam was meeting with him in Japan recently.

Dun dun dunnnnnnnn.

What I Liked
-The leader of the bike club (who I assume is a real guy and not an actor) wears a bluetooth earpiece and looks like a very happy Jerry Garcia. Motorcycle clubs often get a bad rap, but a lot of them are okay dudes.
-The bad guy drives a Ford van. I always think it's hilarious when a show's sponsored by one car company and the bad guys drive vehicles from one of their rivals.
-They finally got around to the Adam plot. Although Kono still hasn't done anything with that cellphone she cloned.

What I Hated
-Magic age-progression software. There was no need for that. They could've just used DNA.
-McGarrett lets Danny beat up a couple suspects, including one that had nothing to do with the kidnapping. I know they don't exactly do things by the book at Five-0, but they're starting to go a little bit off the rails.

Final Thoughts
This episode was a bit of a bummer, especially considering what happened recently in Cleveland. They've either got some psychic writers over in Hawaii, or this was one heck of a coincidence. It's the latter, obviously.

I think the whole coincidence and the fact that most of the episode wasn't really all that much fun really brought me down. The more thought I give to it, the more depressed I become, and that's not what I want out of this show.