Hawaii Five-0 4x05: Kupu'eu

What I Liked
-TV's Terry O'Quinn grew a beard.

It looks good on him.

-Danny tells Grace to break a leg at her cheerleading competition. Hee-hee.
-Joe wonders if Danny and Steve bicker while they're in the car. It's bantering, not bickering, Joe.

What I Hated
-Kono and Adam play The Fast and the Furious: Hong Kong Drift all over the city, and the local cops don't show up. That's weird.
-Billy and Catherine get out of their surveillance van and get into a gunfight. I know it's the US, but they're not government agents of any kind; they can't just open fire on someone in a residential neighbourhood. I'm glad they both got shot.
-This week's product placement: The awesome power of Bing Maps on a Microsoft Surface tablet.
That's way too blatant, even for me.

-The killer manages to live for hours after taking a pretty severe hit to the gut, but then dies 30 seconds after the team gets to his house. How conveeeeeeeeeeeeeeenient.
-The guy who hired the killer was pretty random. And how the hell does an office assistant have the money to hire a hitman, anyway?

Final Thoughts
I guess Scott Caan had a week off or something, because he was barely around, and some of his shots looked like they were done in front of a green screen.

So, they killed Billy off about five minutes into the episode.

That's certainly one way to resolve the stupid relationship drama.

It seems like a bit of a cop out, though. They built it up quite a bit over the past few episodes, what with McGarrett's jealous, lingering gazes and so forth, so it seems a bit anticlimactic to have him unceremoniously shot in the guy by the random baddie of the week. Maybe the writers realized that Hawaii Five-0 isn't Grey's Anatomy, panicked, then fixed their horrible mistake as quickly as they could. That's two stupid, dramatic relationship issues resolved in as many weeks. Hopefully in the next episode they'll finally finish whatever the hell is going on with Kono and Adam... which I still don't care about.

Anyway, despite the end to the Billy-Catherine drama, this was still a terrible episode. The killer was a random guy, the guy who hired the killer was equally random, and not even one of the three Bs was represented. I think that may very well be the first time that's happened, and it doesn't bode well for the series. What makes this show different from every other cop show on TV -and also makes it watchable- is the fact that it often doesn't take itself particularly seriously. This week it was full of gruff, serious-business military guys and Catherine's good buddy getting gut shot. That's not exactly what I'd call wild, madcap antics, and it's not why I watch this show. Even the over-the-top action was missing from this episode. If things keep going the way they have this season, I'm probably going to stop watching soon, because the show's just not fun anymore.