Sunday, November 23, 2014

Hawaii Five-0: Season 5, Episode 8 Review (S05E08) -- Ka Hana Malū (Inside Job)

(S05E08) Ka Hana Malū (Inside Job)
RATING: 1-1/2 stars

Original air date: 11/21/14

After a couple of above-average episodes, this show brought the reboot crashing down to its usual bad reality TV level.

McGarrett's Aunt Deb (Carol Burnett) returned, still cancer-stricken but now undergoing chemotherapy, which presumably accounted for the ghastly makeup the actress had when we first saw her. She's come to Hawaii to get married to Leonard Cassano (Frank Valli of The Four Seasons), a guy with near-perfect teeth who she met in a cancer support group. He has stage four leukemia.

Cassano is a mob lawyer who may have tampered with evidence to get one of his clients off. Jerry, a.k.a. "Mr. Conspiracy," is assigned to investigate this, as if the Supercomputer is broken. When McGarrett, thinking of his aunt, confronts Cassano, her husband-to-be gives McGarrett an unopened package containing this evidence -- which Cassano has brought with him, expecting problems with McGarrett. McGarrett, again thinking of his aunt, decides rather than turning this over to the the district attorney in Cassano's jurisdiction of New York, he instead will put this package on ice, anticipating that Leonard will soon kick the bucket.

Aunt Deb seems to have been brought back to the show to give her nephew an opportunity to reflect on his life. She tells him that although she was a flop as far as her singing career and having children was concerned, she has finally found love with Leonard. McGarrett flashes back to Catherine in Afghanistan, who seems now to have been gone a really long time, coming to grips with the fact that she is really, really not coming back. He tells Deb that Catherine found her friend's kid but now wants to stay and protect him and the other kids in the village from the Taliban (really). McGarrett says "She's found her place."

The crime of the week had the usual crazy plot machinations.

At the beginning of the show, David Kealoha, an investment banker and financial advisor who was under investigation by the SEC for inappropriate use of his clients' funds, is found brutally shotgunned to death along with his wife Kate.

The major suspects are his two sons Jake (Nathan Kress) and Travis (Charlie Carver), aged 17 and 21 respectively, and Kealoha's sleazy lawyer Eugene Goodman (John Billingsley). Travis becomes very suspicious when he flees from a polygraph examination and is trailed in a really obvious way reminiscent of the old Five-O by Chin and Kono to a motel where he meets with Patti Gable (Josie Davis), the MILFish mother of his best friend Tai who, up to this point, has been Travis's alibi for the time period when his parents were killed. Patti, described by McGarrett as a "hot mess" and Grover as "Mrs. Robinson," isn't a murderer and neither is Travis, however -- they were just "doing it" and were thinking of fessing up to Travis's parents soon.

Back to the Five-0 office where the Supercomputer can finally figure out that Goodman had power of attorney over his clients' funds and an old bank account of Kate Kealoha shows that $100,000 was paid to Greg Barber, a known hit man, to knock off the two parents.

But the computer doesn't seem to show exactly who paid out this money, because it later turns out it was not Goodman, but Kate. At Barber's place, after he is knocked off, Grover suddenly finds a laptop which has e-mails from Kate to Barber with pictures of their house. Grover can figure this all out in a matter of seconds. How Kate knew about or contacted the hitman is a big mystery, especially since he was an "old client of Goodman" and seemingly had no connection to her at all. The bottom line, according to Five-0, is: Kate arranged to have Barber kill both her and her husband so the boys could collect a $20 million double indemnity life insurance policy. I am not making this up! Talk about stupid writing!

(This is not as stupid as the revelation during the big final scene about how Five-0 did a blood test on the Kealoha's dog Riley to determine that it was out of commission while the murder was going on, having been doped up by some of Kate's sleeping pills.)

Considering there was no reason for Kate to have both herself and her husband killed, inasmuch as the insurance policy was just on David, a more plausible explanation, which the writer did not consider, would be she hired the hitman to just kill David, but when Barber found the two of them together, he decided to knock her off as well because she was a witness who could finger him for the crime.

But, overriding this logical explanation, this still leaves the question: Why would she, in effect, use the hitman to commit suicide? According to Patti, Kate did try to commit suicide previously when she found out about her husband's financial dealings, but there is a big difference between swallowing some pills and having someone blast you with a shotgun.

Bad, bad, bad!!

MORE TRIVIA:

  • In addition to the usual "twittering" about Catherine on fan forums after her appearance in this show's flashback, and not exclusively by people who have no idea who she is, the following incredible comment was posted on IMDB: "At the wedding as his aunt and husband were saying their vows, there was a close up on Steve and he was crying..or at least looked very sad. It's been awhile since I saw his character that way. I'm kinda hoping it's the first sign of his PTSD that I heard rumoured on the way. Or it could be also that he's happy for his aunt? He'd be more smiling than crying though,no? Or really missing Catherine and the wedding is reminding him of a love, lost? What do you think? I'm hoping it's the PTSD starting." A reality show, indeed.
  • There is a major goof: The two sons' drivers licenses were issued on the days they were born: 08/05/94 and 03/10/97. The license number of Travis, the older brother, is 492H202. He is 5'11", weighs 175 lb and has brown eyes and hair. His license expires 08/05/16. Jake's driver's license is number 343T849. He is 5'10", weighs 165 lb and also has brown hair and eyes. It expires 3/10/19. Their home address is 705 Alinalina Place, Honolulu 96825. (There seems to be more than 1" difference in the height of the two boys in the show.)
  • When the dog runs in front of the car at the beginning of the show, it looks very phony, since it is likely a front-projected backdrop.
  • The Kealoha boys' doper friend Tai Gable is played by Wilke Itzin, son of Gregory Itzin, who played President Logan on season four of "24," a show that Five-0 executive producer Peter Lenkov also executive produced.
  • Hitman Barber, played by an uncredited actor, lives on Oahu, and is tracked down by Five-0 who engage in the usual firefight. But after McGarrett drops through the skylight in Barber's apartment, he has no choice but to shoot him, thus again eliminating a prime suspect, at least for a few minutes.
  • The sound mix for this show was terrible in a few spots, and not because the dialogue was overpowered by the music, as is the usual complaint.
  • When Chin and Kono are tailing Travis to the motel, they are actually photographed in a car driving down a Honolulu Street. Amazing!
  • There is an interesting stunt when McGarrett runs across the top of several parked food trucks when he, Grover and Chin are pursuing Tai.
  • David Kealoha worked for a company called Bordinay Investments.
  • McGarrett uses the term "son of a bitch" when referring to Leonard after Jerry brings him up to date on Cassano's past.

Hawaii Five-0: Season 5, Episode 7 Review (S05E07) -- Inā Paha (If Perhaps)

S05E07. Inā Paha (If Perhaps)
RATING: 4 stars

Original air date: 11/7/14

This episode was hyped big time, because it was number one hundred. There was even a special song written for the finale of the show entitled "All For One" by John Ondrasik of Five For Fighting. I managed to avoid most of this publicity, as I have been trying to do for all the episodes this year so far.

The show had "vague similarities" to an episode of the classic series, the two-hour season nine premiere Nine Dragons, where Wo Fat kidnapped McGarrett in Hong Kong and held him prisoner, applying "behavior modification through stress" to turn McGarrett into a near-robot denouncing his country. There are further references to Wo to Woe Fat, the original series' finale, where Wo exposes prisoners to "compliance ration," some kind of gas which overcomes their "will to resist." In the current episode, Wo Fat kidnaps McGarrett and holds him captive in the basement of a dry cleaning plant which he had purchased several years ago. Wo tortures McGarrett to reveal the location of his father, who Doris, Steve's CIA spy momma, had tried to assassinate. With the help of a black female assistant Eris (Tracy Ifeachor), Wo subjects McGarrett to "behavioral engineering," including water boarding, taser-like electrical stimulation and injection of various chemicals including truth serum. The torture the new McGarrett is subjected to was very nasty twenty-first century torture.

The show began with a "previously on Five-0" of sorts, with a flashback to the beginning of the pilot episode, except McGarrett's father did not die. Instead, he was rescued by HPD led by Danny Williams. This deviation from the original script and much of what followed was obviously hallucinations McGarrett was experiencing thanks to Wo Fat's drugs. Most of it was pretty funny: Danno driving his own car, loving Hawaii and his wife, wearing an aloha shirt and using McGarrett-like interrogation techniques; Kamekona a big time convict; Chin Ho on his way to becoming chief of HPD; Grover a tourist annoyed that his golf clubs had been stolen; and Kono a champion surfer and model doing commercials for lip balm. Other people in the show who had appeared in the past included Jenna Kaye and Victor Hesse. Duke Lukela was still Duke Lukela. Jerry appeared as a babbling homeless conspiracy freak.

Sang Min also appeared once again, this time to help Five-0 take down Johnny Moreau (Gavin Rossdale), who had taken over Sang's business enterprises, including drug trafficking, prostitution and kidnapping. Sang also provided information about who could have helped Wo Fat kidnap McGarrett. This was conveniently confirmed by Adam Noshimuri, whose family had connections to the sale of the dry cleaning plant to Wo, using the alias of Anthony Shu.

Despite the major unpleasantness of the torture scenes, Alex O'Loughlin did an exceptional acting job throughout, and Scott Caan's character's reversal showed that he can play something other than his usual one-note persona.

The big reveal in this episode was that Wo Fat had been raised by Doris McGarrett after she killed Wo's mother during her assassination attempt on Wo's father years before. She continued to do this until her superiors at the CIA forced her to abandon the kid. However, all this produces some serious questions: McGarrett was born 3/10/1977 (as per a screen shot in the season one finale), so when did his mother have time to raise his "step-brother"? McGarrett's father's birth date was March 15, 1942. So Steve was born when his father was 34 years old. His mother died on April 19, 1992 when he was 15.

There was not one, but two fight sequences in the show, perhaps the most intense fights seen on the show yet. The first was McGarrett against Eris, the second McGarrett against Wo Fat. The previously mentioned song at the end accompanied a montage of "greatest scenes from the show so far." The sound mix for this episode was exceptionally good, as were the production values, though there were still a few lines which were difficult to understand. Most of the musical score was the typical noise, though there were a few nice sequences reminiscent of Lost (as were several of the scenes during McGarrett's torture).

MORE TRIVIA:

  • When Five-0 arrived on the scene where McGarrett had been abducted, the Mercury Marquis owned by O'Loughlin's McGarrett (and driven by Jack Lord on the original series) was showing serious damage to the driver's side window. The car was also really dirty and dusty outside which makes me think this is not the original car, despite it having the same license plate.
  • When Five-0 brought Sang Min to Moreau's place, why didn't Moreau bother to check outside to see if there was some kind of setup? Sang's disappearance after he gave Moreau an envelope full of blank paper in the form of dollar bills was far too quick, as was the appearance of Kono and Chin Ho inside the building. Similarly, why didn't Wo Fat, who left the subterranean torture room, hear all the noise during the fight with Eris?
  • The film showing McGarrett and his sister as kids at the beginning of the film, probably made in the late 1980s, had sound. But according to Wikipedia, "few [8mm] cameras were made that could record the sound directly onto the film."
  • Sang Min refers to Kono as "Spicy"; Danno calls Hesse "Bono."
  • Questions about Wo's escape from the Colorado Supermax prison in the last episode of last season remained unanswered. The scar on Wo's face seemed less serious than previously; perhaps he had been visiting the Honolulu Dermabrasion Clinic.
  • Incredulously, some fan sites had people thinking that this was the last episode of the series or that it had been cancelled!
  • You have to wonder about the title of this episode -- does it mean "Whatever"?

Sunday, November 2, 2014

Hawaii Five-0: Season 5, Episode 6 Review (S05E06) -- Ho'omā'ike (Unmasked)

S05E06. Ho'omā'ike (Unmasked)
RATING: 2 stars

Original air date: 10/31/14

Once again the show starts with "Previously on Five-O," taking up about a minute of time, so I guess this is the new norm. This time the flashback was to the story arc of Jerry's investigation of Vintage Books as a front for counterfeiting (or as cartermatt.com said for the third time, "counter-fitting.").

At the end of last week's show, Jerry was kidnapped by Thomas Farrow, the owner of the bookstore. At the beginning of this show, Farrow is at his house and dressed in a leather apron for some inexplicable reason, maybe to scare the tied-up Jerry into thinking he is going to dismember bodies like someone from a horror movie. Farrow chooses a dumb time to deal with Jerry and Helms (his tall bald associate, identified in the credits of earlier shows as Browser, who is also tied up), since there are tons of kids outside on the streets for Hallowe'en. To scare the crap out of Jerry, Farrow has seemingly beaten up Helms, who he says didn't do his job keeping tabs on Jerry very well, and seemingly kills him with a gun. But, as we learn later, Helms really isn't dead -- it's all a scam. In addition to all his other talents, Farrow must be a special effects guy (using squibs to simulate where he shoots Helms) and a makeup artist (corn syrup and food coloring for the blood where he has beaten him).

When Jerry returns home after he is released by Farrow, he discovers that everything has been removed from his basement by the bookstore owner, and I mean EVERYTHING: all of Jerry's research, files, his computer and so forth. You have to wonder -- how does Jerry get back into the swing of things investigating for the rest of the show? Near the end of the episode, Jerry is seen with a small computer, almost like a netbook -- is that sufficient?

McGarrett tries to get a warrant to search Farrow's place because of Jerry's illegal investigation, calling on his deputy prosecutor pal Ellie Clayton from the previous episode. When she doesn't have any luck because of a lack of recent, and more importantly, reliable information, McGarrett does the usual heavy-handed Five-0 number arriving at Farrow's place and threatening him. This totally flops, as does any later attempt to find evidence that can be used to arrest him.

It eventually turns out Farrow is not who he seems to be. Instead of a guy who knows a lot about books based on the experience with Kamekona and the rare book, he is actually a British operative named Major William Corrigan. When his true identity is uncovered by Five-0, he is bitter about the fact that he was court martialled (or "court marshalled," as Entertainment Weekly reported) for killing a family of a mother and four children while serving in Iraq about 10 years before. Jerry gets information that Helms is Lieutenant Colin Helms, who not only is very much alive, but has ties to a "radical IRA splinter group," and the counterfeit money is destined for this group.

McGarrett and Danno go after the money when Jerry tells them about "a freighter anchored four miles offshore" (in other words, not in international waters -- 13.8 miles) which is registered in Belfast. The money is not on the freighter right now, though. It is on what looks more like a large tug. There are very vague similarities here to the original show's tenth season show Up the Rebels, where explosives for Ireland were being transported on a large tug all the way from Hawaii to Ireland. But I think most apologists for the new show would suggest that this tug is just going to the freighter. Whatever. Seemingly under the auspices of the Coast Guard, McGarrett and Danno fly to this tug by helicopter and then rappel down to its decks. The bad guys, including Helms, just sit there until the Five-0 duo have both landed on the decks, rather than shoot at them when they are descending. DUH!!

The crime of the week had some potential, but was let down by the usual mediocre writing. Two men have been murdered, one with his tongue removed, the second with his eyes gouged out. The geeky Max recognizes this "plot" as one from a 1984 horror flick called Jack Knife. There is one more victim to come who will lose an ear. Five-0 manages to make a connection between the first two victims -- Henry Chung and Mark Lerner -- with Kamekona's implausible help; he remembers them from school thirty years before as being members of a bullying gang ("equal opportunity haters"). The third member of the gang was Brad Weiss (David DeLuise). After Weiss loses his ear but survives, he tells Five-0 the killer is Sam Cole, who they horribly abused. Cole is suspected for taking revenge on the three bullies, but when Five-0 gets to his house, it turns out that his son Aaron is the killer, inspired by the cult film. Just in case we can't get this connection, Kono finds reference on a Facebook-like social network page on Aaron's computer at his house with a picture of an invitation to a screening of Jack Knife organized by Collector Maniacs memorabilia shop two weeks before. Aaron also attempted to kill his father, who Chin finds tied up outside. Aaron denounces his father as weak and responsible for the fact that he -- Aaron -- was destined never to get anywhere in life.

FAR TOO MUCH TRIVIA:

  • There are plenty of questions raised about the Jerry counterfeiting arc. For example, why did Jerry take an interest in the bookstore and its fishy activities in the first place? As per the first show of the season, the store's owner, Thomas Farrow, had bought a bunch of antique books from a library in Europe, and the pages from these books, which had a 75% cotton/25% linen content, could be "melted down" and used to make counterfeit money. But why would Jerry take an interest in this? Even though Jerry is someone obsessed by conspiracies, there is a limit as to how many conspiracies and bad things in the world a person can be interested in. This counterfeiting business hardly seems like a "big deal" in the world of conspiracy freaks. This leads to further questions like where did they melt down the money, how did they convert it to sheets and print all the currency? At the end of the show, we see the finished product and there is a LOT of cash. This would require printing plates, a printing press, ink, and other things like chemicals. You have to wonder why Five-0 couldn't have looked into who was ordering supplies of ink and so forth that could be used to print this money, or where a press could be located that was capable of making so much cash.
  • Over and above this is the fact that Jerry is an all-purpose geek who can figure out anything that the team cannot, like the stereotypical Braniac type in movies who can sit down at any computer and type away at 120 words per minute and find out just about anything. The Jerry character, along with the Supercomputer, totally deprives the show of any "process" such as we used to see on the old show.
  • Danno has a few good zingers during the show (as does Grover who acts as the "voice of reason" with regard to Max's stupid Hallowe'en costume, among other things). But Danno's comment that the IRA "died with the last Duran Duran album" doesn't make sense. First, Duran Duran isn't an Irish band, they are English. They had abums in the 1980s and 1990s and all the way up to 2010. Second, the IRA ended in 1969 according to Wikipedia, then changed to the Provisional IRA (which is what most people would still call "the IRA"). It had a cease fire in 1997 and really ended in 2005.
  • The term "serial killer," connected to the crime of the week in the PR for the show, traditionally refers to someone who kills THREE people, not two, though this is a matter of some dispute among FBI bigshots, who will accept two as sufficient to qualify.
  • According to Jerry, Farrow came to Hawaii in 2012, but his driver's license was issued 06/14/2008. The license number is 836H136, Farrow's date of birth is 10/07/82, he is 5'11" and weighs 185 pounds. The license expires on 10/07/2018. His home address is 2210 Purcell Street, Honolulu 96816.
  • When the nerdy employee of the memorabilia shop prints out 1,000 e-mail addresses of people who were invited to see Jack Knife at a screening two weeks before Hallowe'en (the exact location of this is not revealed), it takes him only 56 seconds from the time he leaves Kono and Grover until he returns. This employee refers to a Dolby Digital 5.1 laser disc of the film Dune, something which actually exists.
  • Why does McGarrett get all moralistic about the fact that when Farrow was in Iraq, he killed members of a family which resulted in Farrow's court-martial? Is this consistent with McGarrett's personality? Terrible things like this happen in war, and there doesn't seem to be any evidence that Farrow targeted these people intentionally, but was responding to what he thought was an imminent attack on him and his men. McGarrett then accuses Farrow of killing Helms, which we know did not happen, because he is still alive in Hawaii! This leads to a bitter rant by Farrow, saying "the cowards are the politicians who send us into battle and second-guess every decision we make."
  • Weiss gets a call on his cel phone from HPD to warn him that the ear-chopping killer may be visiting him soon, but he neglects to take the call. The voice mail shows HPD's phone number as 808-555-0155. But why would HPD know Weiss's cel phone number?
  • Jerry comes up with the quote "As far as extractions go, he's [Farrow's] right up there with Hans and Simon Gruber," two villains from Die Hard movies.
  • Ellie says part of the difficulty in getting a warrant against Farrow is the fact that the bookstore owner had "donated money to half of the judges on the island" and "worked on the governor's campaign" (despite the fact that he was only in Hawaii for two years?).
  • Football great Eric Dickerson makes a cameo appearance near the end of the show for no logical reason, other than allowing McGarrett to snap a selfie with him to piss off Danno. This reminded me of the Ed Sullivan show (another CBS show) where Sullivan would get famous people to stand up in the audience and take a bow. McGarrett tells Dickerson that "A.P." came close to breaking his record, meaning Adrian Peterson. The selfie which McGarrett takes has him holding the phone in portrait mode, whereas the resulting picture is in landscape mode.
  • When McGarrett and Danno look in a barrel where all the counterfeit money is stored at the end of the show, didn't anyone think that when they opened the barrel, maybe -- SURPRISE! -- Danno's supposedly dead brother would appear? I would have thought that the sight of the barrel would have at least produced some kind of traumatic reaction in Danno.
  • Chin Ho's classic Mustang, which I thought his personal car, has police lights on the front.
  • Corrigan's service number with the British Special Forces was 171-4321-394.
  • Ellie, who is seen fishing with McGarrett at the end of the show, no doubt leading to speculation about romance between the two, tells him that her father used to take her to Australia, specifically Port Phillip Bay, where she learned her fishing skills.
  • Whereas the previous show's photography had several very GREEN moments, this show seemed to emphasize the color BLUE more.
  • When Five-0 stops Farrow from leaving the country by plane with his store all boxed up, they once again have no connection to the funny money. Farrow protests he is being harassed, but McGarrett says they are holding him for failure to fill out "Form 7501," which authorizes the exportation of commercial goods. This is a Homeland Security document, but it is for the importation of commercial goods.