Hawaii Five-0 3x24: Aloha, Malama Pono

After last week's revelation, Kono is now on the lam in the back of a silver Camaro with McGarrett at the wheel and Danno riding shotgun, as it should be. The HPD are in hot pursuit, but Steve manages to lose them long enough to give Kono a burner cell and let her out. Then they tear off again until they run into a blockade Duke has set up. The Sarge knows what's up and is in no mood for any of Danny and Steve's shenanigans.

I am in no mood. NO MOOD!

Kono's obviously no longer in the car, but she's wanted in connection with a murder, and Duke knows that the guys know where she is. He's willing to cut them a little slack because they're friends, however the prosecutor's office wants her and he doesn't know how much time he can buy them.

Meanwhile, a small plane full of dead people has just landed in a remote airfield. There's no registry and no record of the tail number and half the dead guys are wearing black suits and have empty holsters, so Steve thinks it was a rendition flight. The CIA gets in touch when Catherine starts asking questions about a flight that doesn't exist, and the chief black suit guy tells the team that the plane was carrying Rafael Salgado, a high-ranking member of a Latin American terrorist group. They think he knows about an attack that's going to go down on US soil, so they need him fast and they need him alive.

So they can take him to Cuba and torture him.

One of the dead agents' cell phone called a house twice just after the plane landed, so the guys go to bust down the door. When they get there, Salgado's nowhere to be found, but the woman inside knew him as Pedro back when she was a college student and he's the father of her son... who is now missing. The guy's have no idea where to start looking, so Steve goes to see someone who might.

He ain't pretty no more.

Wo Fat doesn't want to help, but he relents when Steve threatens to cut off his pain medication and points him towards a man who deals in forged documents. On the way out, the guard makes note of the fact that Steve is the second McGarrett to come through in the last few days as Doris recently paid a visit to Wo Fat as well. The documents guy gives up Salgado pretty quickly, however Mrs. McGarrett doesn't break quite so easily. Steve has to berate her until she's practically in tears before she's ready to spill her guts. Unfortunately, Catherine picks up Salgado's car on satellite surveillance, and Danny pulls him away before he can get the answers he wants.

He's so mean to his poor mother.

The guys catch Salgado without much trouble, but the kid isn't in the car. He says he didn't come to Hawaii to kidnap his son; he came to save him from the wrath of his terrorist organization. But he was too late. The terrorists took his son as collateral so he wouldn't talk. The CIA doesn't care if the boy lives or dies, so the head black suit guy tells the Five-0 team to stand down. Danny has a soft spot for kids, though, and he and Steve convince Salgado to help them out in exchange for saving his son's life. When they get to the meeting site, the terrorists double-cross Salgado and threaten to kill his son in front of him. Before they can, the Five-0 guys jump out of nowhere and ambush them. All the terrorists go down, but Salgado takes a bullet in the back while acting as a human shield for his son. They rush him to the hospital, where he gives up the location of the terrorist attack just before he dies.

Elsewhere, Kono is on the run. Fortunately, she has a rich boyfriend whose family owns a secret mansion through a holding company. She tells Adam that the HPD is after her because of his brother and he reveals that he knows she's been spying on him, and despite all appearances, he still claims that he's trying to legitimize the family business. However, his brother is fighting him for control and if his allies see him as weak, he's a dead man.

Together, they go to a warehouse that Adam's father's associates use as a supply depot and they look for evidence that his brother was involved in the murder. They find some bloody gloves, but before they can get away, Michael comes by. While Kono gets out of sight, Adam pretends that he needs a gun because the cops are after him. The ruse works and they both manage to escape without being seen. They take the gloves to Fong in hopes that he can match the dirt and blood on them to the body. Charlie's a bit hesitant, but he agrees to do it because Kono's his chum. The DNA on the outside of the gloves is a match to the dead guy, while the DNA on the inside is a match to Michael. It looks like they've got him dead to rights, but before Charlie can get the gloves to McGarrett, Michael drops by to pay him a visit.

And he is not happy.

After stabbing Charlie, Michael goes to the Noshimuri safe house to confront Kono and Adam. He tells his brother that everything he did was to protect him, but now that's over. He's going to kill Kono, take over the family business, and then Adam is on his own. Adam's not cool with that, so he jumps his brother and in the ensuing struggle, Michael gets shot in the torso.

Unlike when Kono got shot in the previous episode, the bullet does not miss his vital organs.

With their main source of income now dead, Michael's associates are going to want payback. Doris books passage for Adam on a freighter to Shanghai and Kono decides to go with him. Danny and Steve tell her she's crazy, but her cousin tells her to follow her heart and lets her go. Everyone says their tearful goodbyes, and the couple ships out, with Mama McGarrett tagging along to help them get settled.

Later, at Five-0 headquarters, it's been a year since Malia died, and Chin decides he's tired of being alone, so he finally calls Leilani. Also, Gabby comes back because Last Resort was a terrible idea for a show.

Navy officers hijack their own submarine and gain control of nuclear weapons? Who the hell would believe that?

With Doris gone, there's only one person McGarrett can turn to for answers. Coincidentally, Wo Fat asks to see him at the same time he decides to come in on his own. He's fully willing to cooperate and tell Steve everything he wants to know, but first he needs to save him from the men who are coming to kill him. There's an explosion outside the door and sounds of gunfire, followed by someone slowly cutting through the door.

Ah, crap.

What I Liked
-Duke has no time for Steve's BS. Too many people go along with his nonsense, and it's good to see someone who's willing to put him in his place.

What I Hated
-The whole ticking clock terrorist rendition thing. Plots like this make the public okay with sending people to secret prisons so they can be tortured without oversight. Jack Bauer may have tortured people, but at least he always did it on US soil.
-Wo Fat is in a top secret facility with a giant steel door and a dozen armed guards outside. The man has half a face and one working arm; why the hell do they need that much security?
-They do that thing where two people struggle for a gun and it goes off and they don't immediately show who got shot. Is it ever the good guy? Ever?
-Apparently Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan are there to kill Wo Fat because whoever's on the other side of the door manages to cut through a good 35cm of steel in mere seconds. That's 35cm thick.

I guess Wo Fat works for the Trade Federation.

Final Thoughts
Why in the hell did they bother bringing Gabby back? She hasn't been on the show in over a year and it would've been just fine to completely ignore the character and pretend she never existed or have Danny give a throwaway line about how they broke up. Instead, they somewhat randomly decided that everyone needed to find love in the season finale. Steve has Catherine, Kono has Adam, Danny has Gabby, and even Chin has Leilani. Everybody's happy.

This is the second straight finale where something has happened that makes it look like Kono won't be back next season. Of course, she will be and everything will be resolved by the end of the third episode, just like it was this season... or last season for that matter. Remember when Rachel was pregnant with Danny's baby and McGarrett was a suspect in the Governor's murder?

As for this episode, it had one of the three Bs, but Danno hasn't booked anyone in quite a while, and there haven't really been that many bikini babes lately, either. The show's been moving away from what makes it good and trying to become more serious and dramatic. There are plenty of serious cop shows on TV, and Hawaii Five-0 can't really compete with them in that arena. However, there aren't any other banter-based cop shows set in Hawaii out there, and if they stuck to that niche instead of trying to branch out, I think it would be a much better show.

Beyond that, it was an adequate finale. It had a little bit of action, some drama, some romance, and a ridiculous cliffhanger that came out of nowhere and made no sense. So, I'll watch the show next season, but if it starts to decline in quality, I might skip a few episodes.

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.

Hawaii Five-0 3x22: Ho' opio

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

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

Free shrimp for the shrimpy woman.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her lunch is still there, though.

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

Case Closed.

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

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

Dun dun dunnnnnnnn.

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

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

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

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

Hawaii Five-0 3x21: Imi Loko Ka 'Uhane

Aisha Tyler is a talk show host who's filming in Hawaii for a week, and the Governor has decided to allow her to tail the Five-0 team. They're not particularly happy about it, though. McGarrett blows her off, Danno tells her to keep the camera out of his face, Kono just walks away, and Chin says he's very busy but answers a couple questions and says that if he weren't a cop, he'd be playing jazz trumpet.

Like Miles Davis, only not as good.

She lucks out and they catch a case right away. Steve makes sure that she and her crew all sign personal injury waivers before they go, because they just might be entering the danger zone. They race to a crime scene where they find a body so badly mutilated that they can't tell if it's a man or a woman.

Since Max happens to be a big fan of Aisha's show, she gets him to wear a tiny camera when he goes to examine the body. It's a guy, but he's been chopped up pretty good with his face destroyed and both hands chopped off to prevent identification. McGarrett spies the camera and tosses it back in across the police line; apparently he's okay with being filmed, but only from a distance. Which is lucky because while he's busy standing around watching Max work, Aisha is interviewing a familiar member of the HPD.

Dude's got some brass ones.

When he notices Aisha delaying an officer, Steve walks over to complain, but quickly spots Wo Fat, and a gun fight ensues. Since he's a slick mofo, he gets away without scratch.

An analysis of the video that Aisha's crew has been shooting shows that Wo Fat arrived just before the Five-0 team did, so he's not the killer. To gain further insight, Danny and Steve head over to the ME's office, where Max is camera-ready.

The ascot was a bit much.

There's nothing that'll help ID the body. Whoever chopped his hands off was a pro and even removed the skin on his arm to get rid of an identifying mark. Investigative work points to a Russian hitman who just flew into the island, and who's inexplicably still there. Unfortunately, when Danny and Steve bust into his hotel room, he's not there. He is, however, out in the hall, so McGarrett chases him down and dives off a third floor balcony into the hotel pool to catch him.

His form was good, but his entry was a bit messy... I give it an 8.5

Russian guy was surveilling the dead dude, but he has an alibi, so he's not the killer. They have an identity for the body now, though, and they check out his apartment. It's been tossed. His girlfriend's staying at a nearby hotel, and she tells them that someone broke in a couple days ago, he left her at a hotel, then she never saw him again. She also confirms that he had a tattoo on his right arm. Danny and Steve track down the artist who says he gave away the stencil he used to a cop who looked surprisingly like Wo Fat. Luckily, the tattoo parlour has surveillance cameras, and they got a good shot of the stencil.

It kinda looks like a girl I used to know.

Kono performs some fancy computer magic and determines that the bottom of the tattoo contains a map that matches up with some trails through a mountain range on the leeward coast. However, it's a huge area and they have no idea what they're looking for, so the map isn't really much help.

Later, they get a call from the Secret Service. It turns out the dead guy worked for the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. He stole a set of master plates for the US $100 bill and used a 3D printer to copy them. Further interrogation of the dude's girlfriend leads the team to believe that her brother might have shot him and then gone to find the plates himself. And find them he did, about five minutes before Wo Fat found him and shot him in the head. When the team finds his body it's still warm, and they manage to track Wo Fat for a short distance before they spy him escaping in a helicopter.

"Later, suckers!"

Apparently, he's a crap lousy pilot, and the team manages to shoot him down. When they check the wreckage, he's not there, but he's really close and manages to put two bullets into Chin's vest. He's heavily outgunned, though, and the firefight doesn't last long. Suffering from severe burns from the crash and a bullet wound to the chest, Wo Fat asks McGarrett to finish him, but he won't do it. They get him to the hospital where he pulls through.

Steve's not happy about it.

What I Liked
-Fong's face when the cameras show up.

He's not as camera-ready as Max was.

-Aisha catches Danny and Steve bickering in the car. Now the whole world can know about their ball busting.

What I Hated
-Aisha Tyler as the master of exposition. Why show things happening on screen when you can just have someone talk about them later?
-Damned shakycam for a good chunk of the episode. Were I prone to doing so, I might have vomited.
-A really bad cut when they switched from Alex O'Loughlin to his stunt double when McGarrett jumps out the hotel window into the pool. It looked like they tried to hide it, but they failed pretty badly.
-Wo Fat went down in a really weird way. He was escaping in a helicopter, then conveniently flew right in front of the team's line of sight and hovered there while they shot at him.

Final Thoughts
This was not a good episode. It had most of the trappings of a good episode: Bickering... bikini babes... Wo Fat, but framing them with a talk show was a really dumb idea. Maybe the cast needed a little more time off or something like that; I don't know. What I do know is that the portions of the episode that focussed on Aisha Tyler were interminable. Which is actually fairly realistic, since I can't stand daytime talk shows.

I'm also not a big fan of shaky camera work, which this episode had in spades. It was annoying, headache inducing, and may have made some people physically ill. If the best thing you can say about an episode is that it didn't quite make you throw up, that's not exactly a ringing endorsement.

Nevertheless, it did have the aforementioned good bits. If they could re-edit the episode to excise most of the talk show portion, it would actually be pretty good. I don't know if this technically counts as a gimmick episode, but I think I'll call it one. Trying out new things is admirable in today's play-it-safe television climate, but Hawaii Five-0's been doing it a lot lately, and they've pretty much failed every time. The show's been renewed, which gives them some leeway to do stuff they wouldn't normally do, but since it really hasn't worked out, they should probably try to stick with what works more often next season. And, damn it, Danno needs to book someone again!

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.

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.