Sunday, March 31, 2013

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.

Thursday, March 28, 2013

HIMYM 8x20: The Time Travelers


At long last, Future Ted is finally creeping up on the point in the story where he actually meets his kids' mother. But there's one thing standing in the way of their meeting: Robots vs. Wrestlers!

Which I suppose may technically be two things.
Barney drops by the bar with two tickets to Robots vs. Wrestlers: Legends and he wants Ted to be his +1. Unfortunately, Ted has a big lecture to give in the morning and he's not sure he should go out. So, in order to convince him, Barney calls upon the most convoluted narrative device in the history of television.

In order to get Ted to go out, he needs to prove that RvW:L will be a life-changing event. Unfortunately, there's no way to see into the future, so Present Barney can't make a good case. However, he can summon 20 Years from Now Barney to tell Ted just how legendary the night was. Future Barney's not wholly convincing, either, so he summons 20 Years from Now Ted to make the pitch to his past self.

We know Future Ted is a phony because he doesn't sound like Bob Saget.

20 Years from Now Ted says that going to RvW:L will make this night the single greatest night of his life, and that's enough for Present Ted. All four of them are about to head out when they're stopped by someone they didn't expect: 20 Hours from Now Ted.

The Ted of Tomorrow admits that Robots vs. Wrestlers is awesome, but while he was there he drank way too much, dove into the ring and sprained his wrist, and smoked half a pack of cigarettes. Also, he hurled like the time his mom bought beef at the Price Club. Upon hearing that his night was pretty awesome Present Ted is prepared to go just as long as he doesn't drink too much. The other Teds and the Barneys agree that you don't need alcohol to have a good time, but if you're going to Robots vs. Wrestlers, you still kinda need to get wasted. That seems to be enough to convince Present Ted because when they come back to this plot a bit later, he has inexplicably decided to go. They all get up to leave when they're stopped by yet another unexpected guest: 20 Minutes from Now Barney.

He's awfully smug for a guy with a big spaghetti stain on his shirt.

Present Barney laughs at this new Barney for spilling food on himself, then digs into the plate of spaghetti that Carl brings him. Nineteen minutes later, Present Barney has a big spaghetti stain, 20 Minutes from Now Barney has acid reflux from eating Italian food in an Irish pub, and the reason he came back to stop them walks through the door.

It's the coat check girl from Season 1, Episode 5: Okay Awesome. Remember her?

Ted consults with the group, and they all agree he should go talk to her, but before he can approach her, he's pulled into a booth by two people: Two separate versions of 20 Months from Now Coat Check Girl. They convince him that no matter what happens, either he'll get sick of her, or she'll get sick of him, because that's what always happens in his relationships.

Meanwhile, Marshall has invented a drink that he calls the 'Minnesota Tidal Wave' however, Robin's been ordering it so often that Carl has placed it on the MacLaren's menu and named it after her.

Now she has a play and a drink named after her.

Marshall is understandably upset that his creation got the Flaming Moe treatment, so he challenges Robin to a dance-off. They're about to hit the floor when Lily stops him because his dancer's hip has been acting up lately and their doctor wants him to lay off for a while.

With dance-based vengeance impossible, Marshall does the next best thing and writes Robin's phone number on the men's room wall. It doesn't work out terribly well for him since women can enter the men's room with impunity, but men can't go in the ladies' room. After scratching her name off the wall, Robin heads into the women's bathroom to do some writing of her own. Marshall sucks it up and busts through the door to see what it was, and it's not at all what he thought it would be.

It's not bawdy and it's really long.
Robin has left him a message about how sorry she is that she stole his drink and how it all goes back to her childhood and how her father treated her like a cat, but it's all a ruse. The last sentence exposes the whole thing as a lie she made up so Marshall would spend a long time in the bathroom and then have to hide in a stall when a woman comes in. And hide he does.

He waits until he thinks the coast is clear to emerge, but really there are somehow like seven girls in the bathroom. They all flee in terror, and Carl chastises Marshall for being creepy and even uses his name as shorthand for a dude creeping in the bathroom. While Marshall's glad that something is finally named after him, he's also kinda upset at the presumption that he was being creepy, so he resolves to call the next person he sees making a prejudicial assumption a 'Real Carl...' Unfortunately, he doesn't know Carl's last name, and even though he offers to name every drink in the bar after him if he can think of it, Marshall still has no idea what it could be.

Not pictured: Mr. Carl S. Jr.
Defeated, Marshall slinks back to the table. His wife has his back, though, and puts his jam on the jukebox so he can throw caution to the wind and dance it out with Ms. Sparkles.

While the dance-off is going down, Ted finally decides that he's not going to go to Robots vs. Wrestlers, and instead he's just going to go home. He expects Present Barney to try to change his mind, but instead he tells him that the whole 'Minnesota Tidal Wave' thing happened five years ago and everything else was just in his imagination. He's been alone the whole time, trying to decide if he should go by himself.

*Bwaaaaaaaaammmmmm*

Future Ted tells his kids that if he could go back to that night, he wouldn't go to Robots vs. Wrestlers. Instead, he'd go home and look at all his old stuff, visit Marshall and Lily and play with baby Marvin, and visit Robin and Barney and help settle whatever argument they were having. But first he'd run over to their mother's apartment and tell her that he loves her.

And get punched in the face by her boyfriend, Lou Ferrigno Jr.
What I Liked
-Future Ted trolls Present Ted by pretending that he's still not married. In the future he's still a douche, but he's a funnier douche.
-All the Teds and Barneys sing 'For the Longest Time' together. I wasn't a big fan of the multiples as a narrative device, but I recognize how tough it must have been to sync up their singing.

Plus, I kinda like that song.

What I Hated
-Marshall takes forever to read the message on the wall. It may have looked like a lot, but it was literally 185 words long, and should've taken him all of twenty seconds to read.
-The continuity is all messed up. Supposedly the 'Minnesota Tidal Wave' thing happened five years ago, but the gang didn't know about Marshall's dancer's hip until The Possimpible, which was only four years ago. Lily's hair is red in the episode, but five years ago it was brown. And most importantly, at the end of the season five episode 'Robots vs. Wrestlers' Future Ted says the following:
Kids, I'd love to tell you that over the years we didn't all drift apart a little at one time or another. You don't mean for it to happen, but it does. But no matter what, to this day, come hell or high water, we still all get together every year for Robots vs. Wrestlers.
What the hell is the point of having continuity if you're just going to ignore it or screw it up? Up until this season, this show's been very, very good at referencing things that happened in earlier episodes, but this year they've been screwing it up royally. Sure, they brought back Jayma Mays and Joe Manganiello, but the actors are probably the least important part of continuity.

Final Thoughts
This has to be the most confusing story in the history of the world at this point. Not only is Future Ted telling his kids the story of the eight years in his life before he met their mother, he's also telling them about things his friends did, things he doesn't know about, stories he told other people, and now things that he imagined. Future teenagers must have a lot more patience than today's teens.

I won't call it a complete waste of an episode, because things did happen on the show. However, from the point of view of the story it was a complete waste. It was literally an episode about how Ted went to the bar alone and drank one beer. We've had a firm date for when he finally meets the mother for a while now, and now the writers have to kill time until then. No progress or even fake progress can occur because we all know that it won't matter.

The characters aren't driving the plot anymore because Ted has resolved to stop dating, and the narrative's not driving the plot anymore because it already has an ending, so we just have to wait and watch the show spin its wheels until it gets there.

Monday, March 25, 2013

Community 4x07: Economics of Marine Biology


Greendale needs money, so the Dean recruits the study group to help him land a whale: A student with no ambition or chance of graduating whose parents are rich and will continue paying for classes indefinitely. But to get this guy to enroll, they need to create a diversion to keep Greendale's previous whale, Pierce, occupied. That diversion is Jeff.

They're the best of friends.
While Jeff and Pierce go to the barber shop, Annie, Britta, and the Dean show the whale around campus. Unfortunately, he arrived on a brand new Vespa scooter that was given to him by City College, so the Greendale folks have to turn to bribery: Unlimited soda refills, computers, some guy's bling, and basically anything else he wants. Britta plays along until the Dean asks her to dry off the guy's shoes, at which point she bails in disgust.

Meanwhile, Jeff and Pierce are actually bonding. They talk about beer, women, dogs, and how awesome it is to not have to shave your own face.

Seriously, it's great.
The whale's tour culminates with a party in the cafeteria featuring balloons, bubbles, and all the strippers he could ever want.

Although, they arrive in bathing suits that they don't take off, so I don't know if they technically count as strippers.
Annie thinks they've gone too far when the whale likes Magnitude's catchphrase so much that he gets the Dean to give it to him. But since it's all for Greendale, she's willing to shut up about what happened. That is, of course, until the two of them get to school the next day and find a dishevelled Magnitude in the study room trying to come up with a new catchphrase. After seeing that, the Dean heads back to the cafeteria to tell the still-sleeping whale that he would love to have him and his father's money at Greendale, but they're not going to change the school just for him. The whale decides that it's cool to finally have someone who's willing to treat him like a real person and not just kiss his ass because his dad's rich, and he officially declares his intention to enroll at Greendale.

Magnitude celebrates with a big 'Pop-Pop' all over his face.
Jeff's position as a diversion is exposed, but he apologizes and decides to spend more time with Pierce at the barber shop. Also, Abed starts a frat because the Dean tells him not to.

Elsewhere, Troy and Shirley take a class that they thought was PE, but which turns out to be PEE (get it, that spells pee!): Physical Education Education. Basically it's a class where they learn how to be gym teachers. Shirley is good at it and Troy isn't. After a number of embarrassing failures, Troy drops the class. However, when he returns to the gym to retrieve his keys, Shirley is inexplicably there, and she teaches him how to teach PE by teaching him how to teach Kevin. Cue the montage!

This isn't as sexy as it looks, they're just teaching Chang to golf.
When they're done, the professor also inexplicably arrives, and everyone learns a valuable lesson. Although, I'll be damned if I know what it is.

What I Liked
-This week's best line: "Tour sucks, bro. Ya gotta think big: Hookers, blow, hookers..."-Richie

What I Hated
-Let's potato chips had a very pronounced role in this episode and even a commercial in the tag. For fuck's sake, who thought that was a good idea?
-The PEE song and montage. It was the right idea, but the execution was just horrible.
-They screwed up the continuity on Jeff's beard. I wasn't the only one who noticed this, so why couldn't the continuity guy on the show keep track of when he was supposed to be scruffy and when he was supposed to be clean-shaven?
-The Delta Cubes. It could've been fun as the b-plot to an episode, but as a tiny subplot, Abed creating a frat was just pointless.

Final Thoughts
There were three plots this week (four if you count Abed running around like a weirdo) and none of them were any good. I'm beginning to think that there just may not be enough time in a half-hour sitcom to fully develop three separate plot lines. There wasn't even enough time to fully develop Shirley and Troy's montage.

Like most of the classes at Greendale, apparently PEE is a single-day course because Shirley and Troy managed to go through an entire semester's worth of work while Annie and Britta were showing off the campus.

For the first time in quite a while, a show delivered an episode that didn't contain a single thing that I could say I liked. The 'best line' thing is merely a holdover from when Community used to have a lot of really witty/wacky lines that made me laugh like no other show could. That hasn't been the case for quite some time now, and I'm honestly thinking of dropping it entirely. The only reason I might keep it in is that it would look really weird for the 'What I Liked' section to be completely empty.

Allowing Pierce to do something other than be a really racist old man was nice, but we already know that Chevy quits the show over that stuff, so I'm willing to bet that he'll be sliding back into his old ways soon enough.

The season's now more than half over, which is a very good thing. This episode wasn't as terrible as last week's but it still only delivered single digit laughs. This show used to be hilarious, and now it's merely mildly amusing. I'll keep watching until the end of the season, but that's more out of a need for closure than any desire to see more episodes of this crap.


Friday, March 22, 2013

Castle 5x17: Scared to Death


A girl makes a frantic 911 call and tells the operator that something is coming to kill her. Seconds later, the lights go out and she screams. When the gang arrives a few hours later to investigate, she's lying on the floor, apparently scared to death.

She died the way she lived: Wearing a shirt.

The dead girl's roommate, Amanda, comes home and tells Beckett that dead girl had been acting strangely for the past three days. A check of her financial records also shows that she had just recently bought lucky horseshoes and a book on urban legends recently, and a talk with her ex-boyfriend reveals that she got a mysterious package in the mail and she thought something supernatural was coming to get her. Castle and Beckett search the apartment more thoroughly, and discover that the package contained a DVD. He presses 'Play' on the girl's DVD player and is treated to a lovely Ring-style montage that finishes with the phrase "You saw. Midnight on the third day: You die!"

That can't be good.

Back at the station, Castle's very concerned that the spirit of the DVD is going to kill him in three days. Beckett thinks it's absurd, and asks Ryan to watch the video to see if he can find anything useful on it. He won't do it, though, because he and Jenny are trying to have a baby and they don't want to jinx it. Espo won't watch it either, because doing so would make his partner look like a wimp. That leaves Beckett to do the dirty work.

Upon a second viewing, Castle notices it contains symbols representing rebirth and resurrection, and he thinks it means that the video heralds the rebirth of a demonic spirit. His fears are not assuaged when Perlmutter admits that he has no idea what killed the girl.

Esposito and Ryan manage to trace the package, and it leads them to an old man in Hoboken. Only, when they bust down his door, they find that he actually received a similar DVD in the mail, and he's been dead for two days.

He's not quite as freaky looking as the dead girl.

After seeing what happened to the other people who watched the DVD, Castle can't sleep. So, he gives his good buddy Wes Craven a call for some advice on what to do to stop evil spirits. Wes thinks he's being a bit weird, but Castle lies and says he's writing a horror screenplay. Anyway, since the DVD is the portal for the spirit into the human realm, it should contain clues to its origin.

Through the power of Twitter, Castle tracks one of the images to an old inn. A quick search shows that both the dead girl and dead old guy stayed there five years ago, so Beckett and Esposito go to check it out. The creepy innkeeper tells them that based on their room numbers, the two dead people must have been witnesses in a serial killer's murder trial that was held in the nearby courthouse. Beckett thinks that the killer must somehow be getting revenge on the people who put him away, except there's one problem with that theory: He's been dead for three years.

That can't be good.

Though the serial killer may be dead, his younger brother/accomplice is still alive and being held in a creepy mental hospital in Connecticut. Castle and Beckett drive up for a visit and find him to be a very cordial, extremely creepy dude. He doesn't offer them any new information, but he slips up and lets them know that he's aware of the deaths of two witnesses even though they only told him about one.

On the way home, they get a call from Ryan who tells them that the serial killer's body was dug up and has gone missing. He and Esposito also track down a third witness who also got a DVD and then fled the city for his family's cabin in the woods. Castle's a little hesitant, but Beckett insists on going, so he tags along after making a quick stop to pick up his bag of demon-fighting tools.

Featuring incense, ba gua mirror, and holy water. Proton pack not included.

When they get to the cabin, the final witness is drunk and in full-on Bill Paxton 'Game over' mode. Castle tries to convince him to talk things over out in the car where it's safe, but they guy's all freaked out that the killer's back from the grave and before he can get him outside, the power goes out.

Beckett heads outside to see what's happening, while Castle stays in the cabin to guard the witness. She sees someone lurking in the bushes, she tackles the shadowy figure, and it turns out to be the nurse from the mental hospital. She's in love with the brother and was trying to prove he wasn't involved in the killings so his appeal would be granted and he could be let go. She even went so far as to dig up his brother's grave to prove he wasn't a zombie, but the body was already gone.

Meanwhile, the remaining witness tells Castle that he and the other two witnesses were almost killed by guilt because they fingered the wrong guy in a police line-up and that man committed suicide due to the stress of being accused of murder. He also says that the guy had a daughter named Amanda, and wouldn't you know it, but that's the dead girl's roommate's name.

Amanda bursts into the cabin and temporarily blinds Castle with a flash from a specially-modified stun gun. She waits a moment for the capacitor to recharge, and just as she's about to zap the witness to death, Beckett gets the lights back on, which distracts her just long enough for Castle to club her over the head with his bottle of holy water.

Thus saving the day and cleansing her sins at the same time.

That wraps everything up, but still leaves the question as to what happened to the dead serial killers body. As it happens, the guy's corpse went missing from the prison morgue just after he died and the police buried an empty coffin. While he's still out there somewhere, possibly zombified, Castle and Beckett are both happy to have survived seeing the DVD, and when their midnight deadline passes, they celebrate with a little survivor sex.

Aw, yeah.

What I Liked
-Nathan Fillion does some more good face acting in this episode.

His years of training on One Life to Live really paid off.
-Esposito wonders how much Castle values their friendship. Like, would he leave him his Ferrari in his will? That's an excellent question, and it's not like dead people can drive.
-Castle wants Beckett to outlive him so someone will be around to tell his tale of sacrifice and selflessness.

What I Hated
-Castle makes a big show of shutting the blinds when Beckett goes to watch the DVD, but he doesn't shut the ones that face the TV. Sure, the detectives are protected, but the lowly desk sergeant deserves to die? Bad form, Castle.
-They made specific mention of the fact that there were no signs of forced entry in the dead girl's apartment. That makes sense since the killer was her roommate. However, they also mentioned that the door was locked and the couch was shoved up against it, which is not something you can do from the outside.
-The killer showed up for thirty seconds at the beginning of the episode, wasn't even a suspect, then disappeared until the end of the episode. I really hate when that happens.

Final Thoughts
I really wasn't feeling this one. Nathan did some excellent face work, but the plot itself was a bit odd and had at least one gaping hole in it.

I also didn't really see the point of having Wes Craven on. He provided some useful advice, but I think Castle could've probably figured it out on his own if he gave it 30 seconds of thought. They need to go back to having poker games with famous authors. Maybe get George R. R. Martin in and give him some crap for taking so long to write the Song of Ice and Fire books.

Thursday, March 21, 2013

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.