Hawaii Five-0 3x23: He welo 'oihana

An unarmed security guard chases some guys in hooded sweatshirts through a field. Unexpectedly, he falls into an open grave and breaks his leg. As he screams for help, the guys return and bust some caps in his ass. Later, the team drops by to investigate. Max finds the skeletal remains of a human thumb in the hole with the dead guy, and there are at least eight other holes elsewhere in the field.

I'm sure it's just a coincidence.

After some investigation, the cops find a total of eleven holes in the field, each of which contained a human body at some point. They can't ID everyone, but the ones they can identify were all informants or witnesses in cases against the local Yakuza. When two of the bodies turn up connections to Michael Noshimuri, Danny suggests that Kono recuse herself from the case.

When Danny and Chin go to question Michael, he refuses to talk, directs them to his lawyer, and then insults Kono in front of her cousin. Danno stops Chin from breaking his face, but says he won't do it if Michael badmouths their friend again.

At the same time, Kono is off talking to Adam, trying to figure out what's happening. He tells her he doesn't know, and she believes him, but when she leaves, the phone she had Fong clone earlier this season makes an outgoing call. She gets Charlie to trace it and it leads her to a warehouse where she finds eleven barrels, holding the remains of the bodies from the field.

Not quite as much fun as a barrel of monkeys.

Two goons arrive shortly thereafter, and a gunfight ensues. Kono kills one guy then sets a distraction with her phone so she can get a drop on the other. He falls for it, but he still manages to put one in her gut before she kills him. She calls for help before she passes out and when Chin gets there the EMTs tell him that the bullet missed her vital organs and she'll be fine. So he does the only logical thing and says that when she wakes up, he's going to kill her.

Adam is distraught when he gets to the hospital. He thinks his brother is involved with the killings and he was trying to protect her by not telling her what was going on. She forgives him, and starts to tell him that she's been spying on him, but before she can get to it, she gets wheeled away for a CT scan. While she's gone, Adam gets a call on his secret Yakuza phone, and Kono's cloned phone starts to ring, alerting him to its existence.

Dude, she's your girlfriend and you had a secret phone. What did you expect?

Meanwhile, Catherine brings in a file for Steve to look at, and he bolts without telling anyone what's going on. Danny chases him out of the building because he's tired of playing that game, and gets McGarrett to tell him that the FBI thinks they caught Doris hacking into the national fingerprint database. When Steve goes to confront his mother, she admits to being behind the hack and tries to get him to go out for coffee to discuss it. But when he hears a noise from another room, he goes to investigate it and finds Mick Logan and Cmdr. Gutches running some kind of operation out of Doris' office.

He should probably visit his mother more often.

She's looking for the guys who stole the microfiche from her safe a while back. Their main suspect is Craig T. Nelson, who used to work for the CIA and is now up for a big-time federal post that requires Senate confirmation. If the contents of the microfiche got out, it could burn a lot of people, including him, so he stole it, and now he's holding on to it for leverage. The three old folks have been running surveillance and checking out the building for weeks and they're almost ready to launch their Op. However, Steve points out that the three of them have a combined age of nearly two hundred, and they should be out playing shuffle board, not running covert ops.

They're aghast at his ageism and he can't convince them to stop, so he has to go with them. Steve and Doris drop down on the roof from a helicopter while Mick goes through the front door and uses the awesome power of his Windows 8 tablet to help shut down the security cameras and take control of the elevators.

You'll place that product and like it, Treat Williams!

The McGarretts manage to grab the microfiche, but they trigger a hidden alarm and have to make a hasty retreat. Steve makes it out via the roof of a freight elevator, but Doris gets busted and has to have a chat with Craig T. Nelson. Craig offers to trade Doris back for the microfiche and they have a little stand-off in his office. Instead of returning the microfiche, Steve burns it in a trash can. He and his mother have lost their safety net, but Craig will get his fancy new job, so he lets them go. On their way up to the roof, Doris admonishes her son for destroying the film, but he pulls a little sleight-of-hand and magically reproduces it from up his sleeve.

For his next trick, he'll need a volunteer from the audience.

Elsewhere, Danny and Grace are waiting at the airport for his girlfriend Gabby to return. He gets a text from her saying that she's been offered a fellowship, and she's staying in Morocco. A day later, he's sitting in his office with Steve, ignoring her calls when Max comes in with some bad news. He's pulled a slug from one of the bodies in the barrels, and it was fired from Kono's gun.

Case... closed?

What I Liked
-Random shots of girls in bikinis.

I like it when this show gets back to the basics.

-They gave some closure to Danny and Gabby's relationship. I figured they'd just forgotten about it entirely since she hasn't been on the show in well over a year.
-During a lull in the operation, Doris does a magic trick. You've gotta do something during the down time, and magic is better than small talk.

What I Hated
-The security guard asks the guys he was chasing for help. Seems like a good plan. I hope it worked out for him.
-The building rent-a-cops are fine with murdering a woman. Maybe the guys in suits would be cool with it, but dudes who wear shirts that say 'Security' on the back don't get paid enough for that stuff.

Final Thoughts
I'm glad that they managed to tie up a few of the loose plot threads that have been plaguing the show this season. It's been so long since Michael swiped Kono's gun that I'd nearly given up hope that they'd ever get back to it. Plus, they mentioned Gabby. Last season they made a whole big deal about her meeting Grace, but then the actress got a better job and she was never heard from again.

The whole microfiche plot was kinda dumb from beginning to end. Doris hid it in an easily accessible safe rather than leaving it hidden under the floorboards where no one had found it or even looked for it for more than 20 years. Then Craig T. Nelson somehow magically found out about it, hired a guy to steal it, then hid it in his own safe on the very same island where it was stolen, rather than sticking it in a box and burying it in the woods in Montana or something. I'd expect more intelligence from former CIA agents.

Beyond that, Kono was kind of a dumbass, too. She broke into a warehouse without backup and without knowing who or what was inside. Not only are the criminals idiots, but the law enforcement officials are, too. Hawaii is a good place to commit crimes, I suppose.

TBBT 6x23: The Love Spell Potential

The girls are headed to Vegas, baby! And while the cats are away, the mice shall play... D&D. Wolowitz is DMing for the first time, and he uses the opportunity as an excuse to bust out some of his celebrity impressions.

Can you guess who he's doing?

At first, Sheldon isn't too keen on having a new DM, but Howard's talking tree that sounds like Nicolas Cage wins him over. Unfortunately, 30 seconds in, Raj gets a text from Lucy and bails on the game to go make time with a lady. Not long afterward, the girls return. Apparently the TSA agent got a little handsy, and Amy broke her nose. I've always said that the way to stop people getting angry at the airport is to hire models as TSA agents and let the passengers choose who does their pat-down. Anyway, since they're down a player, Leonard invites the girls to join them.

Penny agrees as long as she gets to imbibe some 'magic potion' during the game.

Against all odds, the game goes well and the girls enjoy themselves. That is, of course, until a slightly inebriated Penny decides that Amy and Sheldon should have sex in the game because they're never going to have sex in real life, and Bernadette casts a love spell on them. Embarrassed that her friends think their relationship is a joke, Amy runs away and hides in Sheldon's room.

Being a semi-good boyfriend, Sheldon goes to retrieve her. She realizes that he's working hard to become more comfortable with the idea of a physical relationship, but sometimes she wants things to move a bit faster. He tells her that they technically are in bed together, and that's good enough to get her to go back and rejoin the game. However, as he is a stickler for the rules, Sheldon says that they have to see the love spell through to completion.

As far as those sorts of things go, it's pretty hot.

Meanwhile, at a restaurant that apparently has no dress code, Raj and Lucy have dinner. Lucy's still trying to push herself to do things that scare her, so when her crab cakes are a bit funky, Raj tries to get her to send them back. She just can't do it, though, and when he pushes her to hard, she runs to the bathroom and bails out the window again. But it doesn't go as well for her this time.

Free dating tip: Always remember your bolt cutters.

With the gate locked tight and the window too high to climb back in, Lucy's forced to call Raj to tell him what happened. He comes to rescue her and they have a talk about their relationship. She's scared of a lot of things and can't really talk to him, and he finds that very attractive in a woman. So they make out through the fence.

I'm not sure how he gets her out of there.

What I Liked
-Some of Wolowitz's impressions. Simon Helberg does a pretty good Kunal Nayyar and a passable Nic Cage.
-Penny consoles Amy by telling her losing money, being full of shame, and getting groped by a stranger is pretty much the full Las Vegas experience. Viva Las Vegas, baby.

What I Hated
-Some of Wolowitz's impressions. Simon Helberg's Christopher Walken isn't so great.
-They didn't show the girls getting thrown out of the airport. It was a funny story, but I think the visual would have been better.

Final Thoughts
This wasn't a good episode. Howard's impressions quickly became tired and annoying, and the relationship stuff took up a fairly sizable chunk of time and this show has never done that stuff particularly well.

Lucy and Raj's relationship is developing almost as slowly as Amy and Sheldon's. I know they're all nerds, but sometimes I wish some of them would have more normal relationships.

Castle 5x23: The Human Factor

A man with a bad haircut climbs into his car, which promptly explodes. At home, Castle is playing with a remote controlled tank, complete with wireless camera and a main gun that really fires when they get the call. There's nothing particularly routine about a car bomb, but when Beckett and Castle get to the scene, the car's being hauled off by homeland security, there are shadowy men in black suits hanging around, and Tony Almeida's milling about.

Technically it's just another government dude played by Carlos Bernard, but I'm gonna call him Tony.

They don't have access to much of the evidence, but Esposito manages to scrounge up the dead guy's wallet before the DHS can get their hands on it. The guy's wife and son say he was a Julian Assange type whose been being followed and harassed by various government agencies for almost a decade.

With the various three-letter agencies stonewalling them, the team doesn't have much to go on. But they do know that the bomb was planted well before it blew up, and his neighbours saw an unfamiliar motorcycle race out of the parking garage the night before he died. A traffic camera gets them a plate number, and it leads to a security contractor for a corporation the guy blew the whistle on a while ago.

A very smug security contractor.

She says that her job was to get close to the guy to find out who was leaking him damaging information. To that end, she was pretending to date him, and tells the team that his wife had just found out and threatened to kill him. Under questioning, the wife admits to the threats, but she didn't have the capacity to place a bomb in her husband's car, nor the finances to hire someone else to do it. So the team has no idea who or what was behind the bombing until the tech guys report back on the little bit of evidence they were able to collect before the feds got there: The guy wasn't killed by a bomb, he was killed by a missile. A drone missile.

A cheaply-animated drone missile.

Beckett secures a meeting with the head of the drone program at Ft. Drummond, but when she and Castle get there, Tony's standing around looking all shadowy, and the only answer they can get to any of their questions is "That's classified." On the drive home they get a call from Espo, who tells them that the feds just showed up and seized all their evidence; they agreed to the meeting so they could see what the cops knew and find out what they needed to take from them.

With no evidence left, the team starts looking into the dead guy's associates. They talk to his son, who manages to arrange a meeting with his dad's business partner, Omar. When Beckett goes to meet him, he's freaked out because people have been following him around. Fortunately, Tony's not terribly discreet, so Beckett manages to get the drop on him and takes him into custody.

Omar's a little surprised by that development.

Back at the precinct, Beckett grills Tony in the interrogation room, but he's not interested in talking because he knows his freedom is imminent. After less than three minutes of questioning, Beckett gets a phone call from the Attorney General asking her to release Tony. She does a little bargaining first, though, and gets the AG to get his man to help her with the investigation. His real name is Gerald Stack and he's a special investigator for the Attorney General's office (I'm going to keep calling him Tony, though). The dead guy was under scrutiny by so many government agencies that they needed an objective observer to look into his death. He was indeed killed by a drone, and a few minutes later, Tony gets a video feed from one of his colleagues that shows that someone hacked into the drone's software. The homeland suddenly seems considerably less secure.

Castle suspects Skynet, but Tony tells them the signal came a human being in the southern half of New York State and drops the name Warburg before taking off. A quick internet search tells the team that Simon Warburg was the chief designer of military drone software before deciding to sabotage it and go off grid. They find a video of him warning of the coming drone-based police state, and Beckett thinks he took control of the drone in order to frame the government and prove that the future is now!

Conspiracy theorists always need better lighting.

Using the video and Castle's encyclopedic knowledge of books, they manage to trace Warburg to a farm near Woodstock. When they get there, a black drone flies out of nowhere and opens fire on them. The first pass misses them, but they don't have time to find cover, so when it comes back around, they try to shoot it down. While there's some disagreement over who exactly fired the kill shot, the end result is the same, and the drone crash lands in the bushes behind them. As Castle is revelling in their victory, Beckett notices that the bullet casings on the ground were for blanks. Warburg comes out of hiding and tells them it was only meant to scare away trespassers and he's mighty pissed off that they shot down his favourite drone.

He takes them inside and tells them a story of how two years ago a drone pilot was ordered to fire upon a car that was thought to be carrying militants, but when he got a good look at it, he saw that it was covered with roses because there were no militants inside, but rather a young couple who had just gotten married. After that, Warburg couldn't bring himself to work on the drone program anymore because the next generation we'll be AI controlled and won't be able to make the decision to abort when something seems off. In fact, he wanted to shut down the entire drone program, so he wrote software that would let him hack into and remotely control any drone in the country, and then released it to the guy who got blown up. Except exploded guy didn't want to leak the software to the world because he didn't want any nutjob on the planet able to take control of a drone. But when he returned the software, Warburg noticed that someone had made a copy. Castle and Beckett suspect Omar, so Tony uses fancy facial-recognition software to track him down.

There he is!

Omar hopped on a plane to Lebanon, but thanks to the awesome power of the Office of the Attorney General, Tony gets the plane to turn right back around. Beckett puts the screws to him, but he says he ran because he was freaked out because people were following him and his boss exploded, and he has no idea what's going on. He does, however, know one other person who might have had access to the drone software. Castle and Beckett pay a visit to the dead guy's son. He was pissed off that his father's work was ruining his life and that he left his mom for another woman. People have been blown up for far less. The kid goes down, and Tony is so impressed with Beckett's work that he offers her a chance to interview with his organization. She doesn't tell Castle.

What I Liked
-Castle's official battlefield nickname is Field Marshal Pervert. That seems about right.
-Tony tells Castle that he's wearing a Mission Impossible style mask. Most shadowy agent types don't have much of a sense of humour.
-Beckett attacks Castle in the middle of the night with his remote controlled toy army. Where's tiny Arnold Schwarzenegger when you need him?

What I Hated
-Beckett didn't take any backup to her meeting with Omar. How convenient that the one time she does anything alone is the time when it would've been really useful to have an extra body around.

Final Thoughts
Does Carlos Bernard ever not play some kind of federal agent? He played one on two episodes of Hawaii Five-0 earlier this season. I guess he has one of those federal agent faces.

It's not often that Castle gets topical. Drones are big news in the US these days, but they haven't actually been used to blow people up on American soil yet. If and when that does happen, I somehow doubt that the local police force will be allowed to do nearly as much actual investigating as the TV cops did in this episode.

Honestly, I wasn't feeling this one. The stuff with Castle goofing around playing with toys was fun, but a lot of the rest was equally nonsensical while trying to be serious. Even though there was a lot of intrigue and some spy stuff, the killer was a kid who was pissed off at his dad. That's not novel or even all that interesting, really, so it really felt like a wasted opportunity to me. Plus, no Alexis or Martha this week. The killer was a family member and Castle's family wasn't even in the episode. That just seems wrong.

HIMYM 8x23: Something Old

Last week, this show had one unifying plot. This week it has three. If you're a regular reader, you should be able to guess which episode I liked more.

Plot Why?
Lily and Marshall are moving to Italy for a year, and they need to decide what to take with them. Rather than putting their excess stuff in a storage facility, or erecting a shed on their property on Long Island where their house used to be, they decide that everything that doesn't make the trip across the Atlantic will go in The Bermuda Triangle. What's The Bermuda Triangle? Glad you asked. The Bermuda Triangle is a spot out in front of Lily and Marshall(and formerly Ted)'s apartment building where you can place an item you no longer want and it will be snatched up within seconds. It was last mentioned in season five, I believe. Anyway, since they're having trouble deciding what should go where, they call in a neutral third party.

The Lord of the Douche!

Ted considers himself a legend of packing because once he went to Spain and carried all his stuff around in a fanny pack. However, he makes some very odd choices, culminating with his decision to send an old beanbag chair with them to Italy. When they question his wisdom, it starts a small argument, which only ends when they send him out to buy fanny packs so they can secretly put the chair in The Bermuda Triangle while he's gone. He sees through their charade just in time and rushes back to sit in the chair so no one can haul it away. Then he explains that he has an emotional attachment to it because it's the first thing they bought when they moved to New York and if Marshall and Lily can get rid of it, maybe they can get rid of him, too. They tell him he's crazy, give him a moment alone with the chair, then he gets up and heads to a job interview. The chair disappears almost immediately.

Plot Huh?
Barney and Robin's dad have been bonding. Barney's like the son he never had, and Robin's dad is like the father Barney never had until he finally met his father like two years ago and it turned out to be John Lithgow. To celebrate their new bond, they play laser tag. Things go well at first, but eventually their egos clash and they become embroiled in a team laser tag battle to the... in-game death.

Barney takes the game a little too seriously.

Robin Sr.'s leadership style fails to inspire his men, and they desert him, leaving him to go it alone against Barney's crack squad of ravenous monsters. Eventually, Barney gets the drop on him and plans to execute him with his own gun. But when he tells Barney how proud he is of his ruthlessness, Barney's heart melts and they team up once again to annihilate the kids.

Apparently there is no loyalty on the field of laser battle.

Plot Seriously?
In 1994, Robin and her father visited New York for the first time. While they were there, she buried a locket somewhere in Central Park, vowing that she would return one day to reclaim it and make it the 'something old' at her wedding. Now, almost 20 years later, she's getting married, and it's time to dig it up. Her father agreed to help her, but instead he heads off for "Plot Huh?" leaving her to do it on her own.

She's a digging machine.

After hours of fruitless digging, she calls Barney, but he's busy in Plot Huh, too, and when he asks her if it's urgent, she says it's not. Then she calls Ted, who's just finishing up Plot Why. She tells him it's not really important that he come, either, but he knows that as Robin code for 'OMG, this is so important, come now!' and heads to Central Park to find her. With his help, she finds the box the locket was in and tells him that she's been having doubts about marrying Barney, and the locket is a sign that the universe thinks they should get married. But, when she opens the box, the locket's gone... then it starts to pour rain all over them. She thinks it's a sign that the universe wants her to call off the wedding. Ted tries to talk her out of it and gives a speech about how they already know what they really want and they shouldn't let the universe talk them out of it. She holds his hand, and the camera pans out in a lame attempt to add drama.

It doesn't work.

What I Liked
-In Spain, Ted was known as El Ganso con la Riñonera, which loosely translates as 'the douche with the fanny pack'.

Even the Spanish know Ted sucks.

-"We get it, ya pack a lot in your fanny." That certainly was obvious, yet delightful.
What I Hated
-Ray Wise as Robin's father. He's less a distant father who always wanted a son, and more a creepy weirdo.
-Robin Sr.'s nickname for Barney is B-Dog. That sounds so wrong coming out of Ray Wise's mouth. So very, very wrong.
-Marshall and Lily's weird King Kong sex game. We didn't need to see that.

Final Thoughts
I keep saying it, and it every episode he shows up in just offers more proof: Eric Braeden was a better Robin Scherbatsky Sr. than Ray Wise.

After last week, I had hope that the show had finally turned a corner and was going to start getting better. All the useless filler crap they had to do because they showed the ending first and didn't know what to do to get there was finished and they could move the plot forward in a meaningful way. Then in the very next episode they decided to go back to the whole Ted-Robin thing.

I just don't understand why they bothered to try to create that sort of love-triangle tension when it makes no damn sense. Of course, Barney and Robin's relationship doesn't make any sense to begin with, so I can understand why she might be having doubts about it. But logic has no place on this show, especially since we already know the future.

We know Ted and Robin don't wind up together. We've known that since the very first episode. We also know that she marries Barney because ten episodes ago they did a flashforward that showed her dancing with her father at her wedding wearing a big-ass rock on her left ring finger. You can't create dramatic tension when the audience already knows the outcome.

Beyond that, this episode was just stupid. Barney doesn't need a father figure; he met his dad two years ago and he and Robin spent Thanksgiving at his house. Marshall and Lily don't need to throw out most of their stuff, or even really take that much stuff to Italy; they're going for a year, not permanently. And against all previous notions of her character, suddenly Robin believes in signs. Robin, who doesn't believe in ghosts or bigfoot suddenly believes in signs from the universe. This is so dumb that even the writers recognized it and had Ted tell her how dumb it was. What's worse is that the sign itself was stupid. Apparently, someone dug up a box with a locket in it, took the locket, then reburied the box. That makes absolutely no sense. No one on the planet would do that.

I've been reading rumours that next season will take place entirely during Barney and Robin's wedding, and judging by the synopsis of next week's season finale -which seems to indicate that the entirety of the episode takes place before the wedding- that might very well be true. Although, I expect that in reality it'll probably only take up the first two or three episodes, the fact that it even seems plausible to me shows just how far this show has fallen.