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.

Castle 5x20: The Fast and The Furriest

A car speeds up to the patient drop-off at an ER, dumps a woman on the ground, and speeds away. She's still alive, but badly injured and she dies soon afterwards. Perlmutter doesn't have an immediate cause of death, but her face is covered in what look like claw marks. A little research determines that she was getting a PhD in evolutionary biology, and she worked at a sanctuary for primates who retired from the movie business.

Beckett and Castle head over to the sanctuary and have a talk with the director. He says that the dead girl had very little direct contact with the animals, and that even if she did, the animals are very gentle. He also mentions that she had an angry confrontation with someone in the parking garage a few days earlier. While he describes the guy to a sketch artist, Castle is accosted by a man in a gorilla suit who threatens to kill him.

It doesn't quite look real.

A witness points the team to a small-time thug, but when Beckett brings him in, he claims that he found the girl lying in an alley and didn't stick around at the ER because he didn't want to take the blame. He gives her directions to the crime scene, where Castle and Beckett find a blood stain and some giant footprints. Castle knows just who the killer was.

Bigfoot.

Beckett's a little incredulous, but Castle wonders just exactly why someone would try to frame Bigfoot for murder. Back at the precinct, battle lines are drawn once more: Castle and Ryan think their killer could be the legendary sasquatch, while Beckett and Esposito think it was just hoaxers trying to get money out of some crappy reality show that's offering $1 million for proof Bigfoot exists.

However, as it turns out, the dead girl's very last phone call was to world-renowned Bigfoot researcher, Dr. Darrell Meeks. The doc tells Castle and Beckett that since the girl was a member of the First Nations, to her tribe, the sasquatch was a benevolent protector. She told him that she actually saw one as a child, and that's why she devoted her life to studying primate evolution. Meeks figures that she may have been followed by someone who thought she might lead them to a Bigfoot so they could claim the million bucks. He also identifies the other primate researchers saw her arguing with.

International big-game hunter, Chase Diggins.

It just so happens that Diggins has a hook for a hand (his left hand having been gnawed off by a sasquatch), which could have been used to make the wounds on the girl's face. Ryan and Esposito track him to a very creepy warehouse, and bring him in. Under interrogation, he admits to being in the alley where the girl was killed, but he was there the night before she died, watching her stamp fake sasquatch footprints into the dirt.

With Bigfoot seeming like a less likely suspect, the team focuses their attention on a pendant that was inexplicably found in the dead girl's stomach. Her friends indicate that it didn't belong to her, but rather to her roommate, who was murdered a year earlier. Esposito also manages to link a piece of glass found embedded in her skull to a wi-fi enabled camera, which leads to some video she uploaded to the cloud. It seems to capture her murder, but unfortunately it's very dark, so it's not particularly helpful in identifying her killer.

It's a street light.

The police tech department manages to narrow down the murder's location to a two square mile section of woods, so Beckett and Castle trudge out to the forest to investigate. They don't find the crime scene or Bigfoot, but they do find a Bigfoot trap, which they promptly fall into. Castle manges to boost Beckett out, but he has to wait in the pit while she goes back to the car to get some rope. During his imprisonment, he tries to dig himself out with a spork, and he's accosted by yet another dude in a suit.

This time it's actually supposed to be a dude.

Beckett returns to find a sasquatch staring into the hole, and wisely draws her gun. The surprise of seeing someone wave a gun in his face causes him to stumble backwards into the bit, where he removes his mask and reveals that he's actually Dr. Meeks and not Bigfoot. Meeks has been out stalking sasquatches all day, and he's even found what he thinks is a club that Bigfoot used to kill his prey.

Back at the precinct, Esposito and Ryan have rounded up the dead roommate's ex-boyfriend, who was the prime suspect in the roommate's murder. He says he's been living out in the woods for the past year and that the dead girl has been helping him by bringing him food and supplies because she didn't believe he killed her roommate. He also tells them that the roommate's pendant was stolen when she was killed, so the fact that it turned up in the dead girl's stomach meant that she had found the real killer. A quick investigation points to the director at the primate retirement home, who had been accused of harassing various female students over the years. Castle and Beckett confront him, and the look on his face makes it pretty clear that he's guilty.

Case closed.

Meanwhile, on the home front, someone or something is stealing Castle's leftovers. Martha and Alexis swear it wasn't them, and the housekeeper hasn't been there in three days, so it's a mystery, and there's nothing Castle loves more than a good mystery. In order to catch the 'giant super rats' that are swiping his chateaubriand, he sets a trap, which goes off just as he and Beckett are about to get busy. But, when they run out to catch the perpetrators, instead of a squad of giant rats, they find one relatively large daughter.

Getting caught made her a little blue.

Alexis bolts when confronted with her tennis racket wielding father, but few days later, she returns to the scene of the crime to talk about what happened. Despite the fact that he gives her a generous allowance, she's out of money because she invested it all in her friend's idea to plant rooftop bamboo gardens. She didn't ask her dad for the cash because she's tired of hearing the speech about how people might try to take advantage of people like them who have the kind of money they do. Castle's not too upset because giving all their money to causes they believe in is kind of a family trait, but she stills owes him a chateaubriand, so he gets her to call her friend, and the three of them go out for dinner to discuss how bamboo's going to save the world.

What I Liked
-Castle has to hold Ryan back when Esposito talks smack about leprechauns. You shouldn't insult a dude's cultural heritage.
-The killer broke a camera over the girl's head when he killed her, which explains why there are so few photos of Bigfoot. That actually makes a lot of sense.
-Alexis flips out and just runs away when she gets caught stealing. That's a fairly reasonable response when you get hit in the face with a dye pack.
Castle's voice breaks a little when he gets Beckett to promise to come back for him. Nathan Fillion's voice work is almost as good as his face work.
-Beckett has giant, sasquatch-sized handcuffs. You never know when they'll come in handy.

What I Hated
-The bad gorilla suit. It was a step up from the one in Congo, but it was still quite obvious that it was fake.

Final Thoughts
The brought back Jonathan Frakes for another directing gig. He didn't make a cameo this time, though, which is a shame. He would've made a pretty good sasquatch. They've given him a couple fun episodes this season.

And this episode was indeed fun, which is what I think Castle should be. They can get really dark or dramatic sometimes, but for the vast majority of episodes, they really ought to be solving murders with the help of Castle's goofiness. There are very few other shows out there that would have a character who seriously considered the idea that someone may have been murdered by Bigfoot; Castle has two.

That being said, I didn't enjoy this episode quite as much as The Final Frontier. It was really good, but it didn't have as many fun bits as that one did. However, it did have a dude in a sasquatch outfit, and Alexis getting a face full of blue dye, so I'd have to say it's my second-favourite episode of Castle this season.

TBBT 6x20: The Tenure Turbulence

While the guys are eating lunch in the University cafeteria, Kripke comes in to inform them that the horrible smell coming from Prof. Tupperman's office was actually Prof. Tupperman. He's been dead for two weeks now, which means two things 1) They may never get the smell out of the carpet and 2) A tenured position is now available. Barry heads off to plant his nose in the tenure committee's collective butthole, but the three PhDs at the table decide that they'll apply, but they won't make fools of themselves trying to win the job. That lasts all of one day. Over three individual dinners, they decide the stability tenure offers is worth a little schmoozing.

Fancy meeting you here.

Leonard starts things off by accosting the head of HR at the gym. Unfortunately, he hasn't done any cardio work in quite some time, and he winds up in a heap on the floor while Kripke successfully works the elliptical machine beside Mrs. Davis. Since he can't talk to women, Raj sends her a 90-minute video explaining his genius, while Sheldon stops by her office to butter her up by giving her a DVD copy of Roots.

It may be a racially insensitive gift, but LeVar is awesome in it.

Their next step is to hobnob with the committee at Tupperman's memorial service. Sheldon brings Amy along so she can talk up his academic accomplishments and tell him which emotions he should be expressing. Leonard brings Penny along so she can show off her boobs.

Raj sees what she did there.

As the guys bicker about the ethics of using their ladies to advance their careers, Howard and Bernadette arrive. Since he only has a Masters, Wolowitz can't get tenure, and he encourages the guys to talk smack about each other's mothers because it's just so much fun to watch. Sheldon proves to be surprisingly good at it, even accidentally making a 'come across your mother' remark. But, seeing how their competitiveness is driving them apart, the three PhDs resolve to go home and let their work speak for itself... until Kripke shows up.

He's the master of schmoozing.

They can't let Barry win, so everyone goes into the memorial service, and despite their quirks, Mrs. Davis puts them all on the tenure short list. She's even willing to overlook Sheldon's accidental racism.

What I Liked
-Raj works out some daddy issues over dinner.

No one else can ride my bejewelled elephant, either.

-The video Raj makes shows him discovering the moon at the age of five. Truly, he was a prodigy.

What I Hated
-Kripke's speech impediment. Most of the time I can understand him, but he had a couple lines in this episode that were just unintelligible.

Final Thoughts
It's rare that they do an episode with a single plot, but the entirety of this one was devoted to the guys' quest for tenure. They didn't even do a little side plot about how Howard was jealous and resolved to get his doctorate or something like that. I find it really refreshing for a sitcom to devote enough time to really flesh out a plot, even if it's not the most interesting one in the world.

And it certainly wasn't the most interesting plot in the world. I think I've seen the 'the guys compete for something and wind up fighting' plot about a hundred times now. They didn't spend a whole lot of time on the fighting portion, but that's still not exactly a new spin on an old story. The episode still managed to deliver a good number of laughs, however they weren't really related to the plot, and some of them were a bit juvenile, so I can't give this a really high score.

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.