Hawaii Five-0: Season 5, Episode 13 Review (S05E13) -- Lā Pō‘ino (Doomsday)

(S05E13) Lā Pō‘ino (Doomsday)
RATING: 3-1/2 stars

Original air date: 1/30/15

I liked this show, despite the fact that, if you think hard about it, much of it was pretty stupid. It was a total turn-off-your-brain, kick-ass episode, something we haven't seen for quite a while. In fact, I think this was the most kick-ass of any episode I've yet seen on Five-Zero, though my memory for past shows is not what it could be. The crime of the week took up the entire 44 minutes and there was a minimal amount of the usual "ohana" drivel.

The beginning of the show had a "holy fucking shit" moment. Joe White, now running a private security business, comes back to Hawaii accompanying Mitch Lange, a serviceman who has contracted H5N4, a deadly form of bird flu. Why Lange is isn't being taken to the mainland is a mystery, especially since it's later revealed there is no level 4 biosafety lab on Oahu where he could be treated.

McGarrett grudgingly meets Joe, expecting no doubt to be jerked around yet more by his former mentor with regards to issues concerning his mother. But Joe says that he is "not gonna duck [questions] anymore ... You want answers -- I'm here to give you answers." McGarrett is skeptical, describing his mother as "self-serving."

As they are on their way to Tripler Medical Center to give Lange a shot of serum which will cure his ails, complete with a hazmat team and a police escort, a giant wrecking ball hits McGarrett's car and several terrorist types appear out of nowhere and kidnap Lange. Both Joe and McGarrett seem to be seriously injured, but McGarrett hops on the motorcycle of some cop who got knocked off during the attack and follows the kidnappers' truck. Once he finds it, it is empty.

At the Five-0 offices, Nalani Dyer, the Honolulu Center for Disease Control station director, played in a rather matter-of-fact way by Clare Nono, gives the team the dope on Lange's malady, which has a very high mortality rate of 85% (actually 93.9% according to the stats Dyer rattles off, 1315 of 1400 infected people in the Philippines where the virus originated). Later, Dr. Jill Loi (Elaine Kao) at the University of Oahu tells Danno and Kono that if the virus reaches the general population, it will not only decimate everyone in Hawaii, but everyone in the entire world!

Five-0 later determines that Dr. Howard Rennick, head of virology at Oahu State University is somehow involved with the attack. When they arrive at Rennick's home, they have a firefight with terrorists, and they find Rennick's wife tied up in a closet. She tells them six men kidnapped her husband three days ago.

Despite the fact that Dyer said it would be difficult to set up a level 4 lab, the bad guys got Rennick to order $30,000 worth of laboratory equipment with his credit card and all these supplies were delivered to Oahu and set up on some farm in the middle of nowhere (Hau'ula) ... within the last three days!

Not only that, Michael Carson (Mikal Vega), the guy in charge of this operation, a former CIA agent who went rogue years before and recruited various mercenary types from Yugoslavia, Albania and Russia to help him, is able to test the virus, which will be distributed with bees who have powder extracted from Lange's infected blood on their wings using a process called lyophilization (freeze-drying).

Everyone suddenly becomes very clever. McGarrett realizes that charred burlap and pine needles found in the nostrils of one of the terrorists he shot dead during the initial attack is something associated with a "bee smoker," a device used in beekeeping to calm honey bees. Chin Ho cross-checks spikes in power (a level 4 lab needs a lot of electricity) with addresses where bees have been purchased or sold recently.

Five-0 arrives at the farm in the middle of nowhere and has yet another shoot-out with the rest of the terrorists, but a "Waimea Honey Company" truck full of bees manages to head to downtown Honolulu to do damage. Joe White manages to get on the truck and is involved in various mind-bending stunts, including driving the truck off a dock in a manner highly reminiscent of the show Hookman in order to neutralize the virus-laden insects.

The show ends with McGarrett and Joe sort of friendly, but McGarrett is still suspicious that Joe is hiding something. I am predicting in my Nostradamus manner the dreaded double-M (McGarrett's mom) will be appearing soon, or at least her story thread will come to an end.

MORE TRIVIA:

• Hau'ula, the location of the farm, really is "in the middle of nowhere." According to Google maps, it would take over an hour to get to Honolulu if you wanted to drive a truck off a dock there.
• I'm sure the shots of the huge cargo plane landing at the beginning of the show, containing Lange and the hazmat team, have been seen before in some other episode.
• Rennick's employee number on his O‘ahu State University identity card is OSU20-00457. O‘ahu is spelled incorrectly with an apostrophe rather than an okina (yes, I know ... I spell it wrong all the time too!).
• As Joe White is driving the truck full of bees off the dock, he says "The only easy day was yesterday," the motto of the Navy SEALs.
• Considering how deadly this H5N4 is, it's disturbing how McGarrett opens the empty truck which contained Lange's body at the beginning of the show and the way the Five-0 team stands around looking at Lange being removed from the farm at the show's end.
• There are episodes of the original Five-O with vaguely similar themes:
  • Episode 30 -- Sweet Terror -- A terrorist wants to wipe out the Hawaiian sugar cane industry with a fungus so countries will have to buy their sugar from a certain "island" (Cuba, which is not specifically named).
  • Episodes 46 & 47 -- Three Dead Cows at Makapuu -- A microbiologist who develops a "biological mutation hostile to all forms of life on earth" comes to Hawaii where he intends to unleash this deadly substance and wipe out all life on Hawaii as a protest against the evils of biological warfare and show that "the world is on the brink of a terrible catastrophe."
  • Episode 188 -- A Killer Grows Wings -- A sleazy land developer introduces harmful insect larva into the sugar cane crop on a woman's ranch because he wants her to sell the place to him for peanuts so he can develop a $30 million resort village.
• Bad words: "You weren't really born a crazy son of a bitch" (Grover to McGarrett); "I bet that pissed you off" (Joe to McGarrett).
• When McGarrett tells Joe about his last encounter with Wo Fat where he found out about his mother covering up the murder of Wo's mother, he says "that was a crime." This is pretty funny, considering some of the hijinks he and the Five-0 team have gotten away with in the last five years.
• The February 2nd episode of the CBS show NCIS: Los Angeles is also featuring bioterrorism!
• By the end of the show, we never find out what really motivated Carson, the boss of the operation. Was he trying to ransom someone (like the government) or what?

Hawaii Five-0: Season 5, Episode 12 Review (S05E12) -- Poina ‘Ole (Not Forgotten)

(S05E12) Poina ‘Ole (Not Forgotten)
RATING: 2-1/2 stars
Original air date: 1/16/15

This show, which dealt with "family" from several angles, began with Grover comforting his daughter who was freaking out over her kidnapping and confinement by Ian Wright last season. This, plus the following heart-to-heart between Grover and Chin Ho plus scenes with Grover and his daughter at the end of the show, made me wonder -- is there going to be some further development of this in a future episode?

Then we cut to another family scene at the household of Dr. Christine DuPont (Sarah Jane Morris), chief neurosurgeon at the Kuakini Medical Centre. Her kids are being a pain and her husband Mark (Brian Letscher) has to deal with them. She has been called to the hospital on her day off to perform an emergency operation.

Next we see Alex Mackey (Gregory Itzin), a kindly grandfather type, getting his grandson off to school on a Roberts Hawaii School Bus. He tells the kid that they will go to J.J. Dolan's for pizza later (a real Honolulu restaurant located in Chinatown). We see Dr. DuPont arrive at her job, where Mackey suddenly appears in the parking lot, pulls out a gun and shoots her dead in her car.

After the main titles, McGarrett is seen jogging with Danno's daughter Gracie in preparation for a competition when the two of them see his 1974 Mercury Marquis Brougham which has been stolen. McGarrett leaves Gracie and pursues the car, knowing exactly which fence and hedge to leap over in the neighborhood so he can unsuccessfully try to catch the car on the next street.

When he arrives at the hospital crime scene, Danno gives McGarrett a hard time about abandoning Gracie. McGarrett replies that at least "I didn't leave her in the middle of Makaha," suggesting not that this is a bad place, but one in the middle of nowhere (see the map of Oahu).

Five-O thinks that DuPont's murder has something to do with an operation she was going to perform on Paul Delano (William Baldwin), temporarily out of Halawa because he has been diagnosed with a possible aneurism. Chin Ho and McGarrett pay Delano a bedside visit in the hospital where he taunts Chin with the fact that his brother Frank killed Chin's wife Malia ("How's what's left of the family?"), among other things.

This part of the plot had very vague similarities to S03E01 of the original series where a young girl was kidnapped by Wo Fat to prevent her surgeon father from performing an operation to save the life of a government agent whose assassination under Wo's direction was bungled. But the business with Delano is a red herring, since there is no reason why someone would have knocked off the doctor to get rid of him because, while he has been shooting his mouth off in Halawa recently, he is not trying to pull off some big takeover in the prison, by his own admission.

Having eliminated Delano as having anything to do with the doctor's murder, Kono finds some recordings on DuPont's work desktop computer she had made with another patient who recently died -- Mana Tahni (Rodney Oshiro), a low-level criminal loser who has been in prison for 40 of his 55 years. Tahni was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer and gave the doctor an astounding confession before he died, but according to Max, he didn't die from cancer, but from having been smothered in his hospital bed with a pillow.

Tahni told her that years before at the Wilea Reform School where he was incarcerated he witnessed four boys -- friends of his -- being taken to solitary confinement in a swelteringly hot basement. These boys, who had escaped from the place in June 1974 with Tahni and had stolen the car from one of the guards before they were recaptured, were never seen again and Tahni suspected that they had all died as a result of their punishment. The doctor had apparently been snooping around on the Internet later trying to find information about this case, though you have to wonder why she didn't just turn the whole matter over to the cops.

Along with information about the four boys, DuPont also got the name of the warden of the school, Walter Russell (Wings Hauser), who was forced to resign in 1975 over "official misconduct," including abuse of boys at the school. When Grover, Danno and McGarrett visit Russell, he turns out to be a Vietnam vet and Class A nut job whose place in the middle of nowhere is booby-trapped with punji sticks that are straight out of the movie The Green Berets. After Russell tries to escape and is killed by one of his creations, Grover deduces that he was seriously "off his meds." Once again, Five-0 loses a suspect during their "pursuit of justice."

Kono makes a further connection between Russell, the reform school and the bad guard (nicknamed "Huhu," or "Angry") who turns out to be Mackey from the beginning of the show. After the reform school closed down, he got a job as a maintenance man for 36 years at DuPont's hospital, and Five-0 suggests he knew the ins and outs of the system there and managed to keep his face off the security cameras when he was shooting the doctor.

But this is just sloppy writing, because Mackey retired from the place in 2011 (at least 3 years before), so why would no one recognize him (or not) if he was around the place? As well, it is said that he "had access to Dr. DuPont's schedule," which makes no sense, because she was called in to do the operation on the morning she was killed, at which time Mackey was seeing his grandson off on the school bus ... not the night before when Mackey was supposedly killing Tahni with the pillow in the hospital. And why would Mackey even know about Tahni? Would the doctor have mentioned his name to Russell? Even if she had been scheduled the night before, would Mackey have had access to any of this information regarding her schedule? At least we can guess that Mackey was tipped off about the doctor's investigation by Russell, who the doctor had phoned, according to her phone records.

Brought to the blue-lit room, Mackey essentially tells McGarrett and Danno that they have nothing on him, which is probably correct, because the only thing they do have is Tahni's confession taped on DuPont's phone, which is probably inadmissable in court. But after the four boys' bodies are discovered outside the school, McGarrett says that they have finally got evidence to convict ... but what is this? Fingerprints on the shackles put on the boys? DNA of some kind? They don't say, but Mackey blabs away in the best Five-Zero tradition, completely implicating himself!

Back at the Five-O office, McGarrett gets to play social worker with Nahele Huikala (Kekoa Kekumano), the kid who stole his car, who has been living on the streets, and whose family is a mess. Rather than have the kid busted, McGarrett gives Pua Kai, who makes yet another appearance, some money to get the kid dressed and fed. Later Nahele gets a job at Kamekona's Shrimp Shack, serving the Five-O ohana who guzzle beers on the beach as the usual banal plink-plunk music plays in the background.

This episode should really get only two stars because of its excessive family focus and script stupidities, but I give it a half star more for its exceptionally good villains: Daniel Baldwin, Gregory Itzin, who gave "bad presidents" a bad name with his portrayal of Charles Logan on "24," and Wings Hauser.

MORE TRIVIA:

• The four boys who died at the reform school were Tai Saluni, Poto Kanoa, Fata Lotomau and Jason Inoke.
• Mackey's driver's license number 6H83244M shows that he lives at 3412 Nalunalu Street, Wai'anae 96792. His birthdate is 06/10/1952 (Itzin's actual birthdate is 04/20/1948), the license was issued 04/18/2008 and expires 06/10/2022. He is 5'11" (actually 5'9"), weighs 195 lb. and has blue eyes.
• Russell's prescription of the antipsychotic drug chlorpromazine from Dr. William Matushira was filled on 10/29/14.
• Bad words: "son of a bitch" (twice from McGarrett over the theft of his car, once by Danno to Mackey); "You bet your ass I do!" (Delano to Chin Ho)
• Danno refers to McGarrett's stolen car as a "death trap on wheels" and a "classic piece of junk," phrases not likely to endear Danno to fans of the original show. Later when the car is found, it is on blocks with the wheels missing. It looks depressing, aside from the fact that it is filthy dirty. Pua Kai and Duke are part of the team investigating the car's disappearance. Later when Danno is calling the car "a piece of junk car of yours," McGarrett has a good line: "Don't trivialize my suffering."
• Max plays some of "The Merry Widow" which he says is from Dimitri Tiomkin's score to the Hitchcock film Shadow of a Doubt on the piano in his office. But the Merry Widow Waltz heard in this film is not by Tiomkin at all, but by Franz Lehar.
• The punji sticks at Russell's place are obviously made of rubber rather than bamboo.

Hawaii Five-0: Season 5, Episode 11 Review (S05E11) -- Ua ‘aihue (Stolen)

(S05E11) Ua ‘aihue (Stolen)
RATING: 2 stars
Original air date: 1/9/15

This episode was bland, with far too much cutesy-poo stuff, especially Kamekona getting involved in some Shrimpapalooza cook-off, being tutored Karate Kid-style by Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto and going up against Sam Choy (both real Hawaiian restaurateurs). Maybe this comic relief was to make up for the absence of Danno, who was nowhere to be seen. Jerry did appear, helping out Five-0 in the Takahamo Cleaning & Restoration truck, including running it into the bad guys at the end to stop them from escaping.

The crime of the week involved Lukas Janssen (Henri Lubatti), an art thief from Belgium, smuggling a stolen Van Gogh into Hawaii and, to avoid getting arrested, hiding the painting in the carry-on suitcase of Bryan Wallace (Gerald Downey), a father travelling to the islands with his family. After Wallace arrived and was settled in his hotel room and the rest of his family went down to the pool, he was shot by Janssen, who took back the painting. Janssen then used it as an entry ticket to meet local art collector Tom Emery (Casper Andreas) who offered similar valuable stolen paintings for sale to a select few in a back room of his Oahu mansion.

As usual there was something stupid in the script -- in this case, the fact the Janssen put the Van Gogh into the carry-on suitcase. Maybe someone would like to explain to me how he did this. Was the case beside the family in the pre-boarding area of the departure terminal or was it in the luggage space above the seats on the plane, where Janssen was sitting right next to them? In either case (no pun intended), wouldn't have someone SEEN Janssen open the suitcase (assuming it was not locked) and put the painting inside? Geez...

Acting undercover, Chin and Kono infiltrated a get-together at Emery's place with the help of geeky dealer Gerard Hirsch (Willie Garson), who was attending an art collectors' meeting and auction in Honolulu. (Kono, wearing slinky dresses, was -- as expected -- the "bait" to attract him.) Unfortunately, their cover was blown by Janssen and his technologically sophisticated associates, who took everyone at Emery's hostage and then attempted to escape with the paintings from the inner room, resulting in a ridiculous shootout outside the mansion which put the fleeing guests in great danger.

The other major guest star was English actress and Lost alumni Rebecca Mader playing Nicole Booth, an investigator for Bishop & Copley Insurance who was trying to track down the Van Gogh, supposedly worth $55 million (the painting seen in the show was based on one in real life).

Once again, out of all the cops at HPD, Officer Pua Kai (Shawn Thomsen) had some connection with Five-0. This was surprising, considering his antics two episodes earlier with the ticket he gave McGarrett and Danno for cutting down the Christmas tree. In light of this, I was surprised that Kono didn't have anything to say about working with him, but maybe this was counterbalanced by his confession that he was no longer interested in her and had found another girl friend (note to show producers: please spare us from encountering this woman in a future episode!). Pua appeared in the hotel's security room, trying to figure out via surveillance camera footage who attempted to kill Wallace, drawing on his former experience in S03E17 as a security guard at the Marriott Hotel. At Kono's direction, he managed to pull up a closeup of a tag on Wallace's suitcase that Janssen was taking out of the hotel. Do security cameras usually have such magnification?

The photography had plenty of tourist shots, plus quite a few closeups of McGarrett. The music was back to its usual nonsense, including far too much of the string pizzicato-like accompaniment.

MORE TRIVIA:

• Tom Emery's place was located at 1055 Olohua Road, Honolulu 96816. His driver's license, number 938H311, showed his date of birth as 08/22/1974 and was isued on 08/22/1998 with a 20-year span (according to various WWW sites I checked, the longest you can get a license for in Hawaii is 8 years). Emery was 5'11" and weighed 175 pounds.
• Janssen's Belgian passport number P3013GL showed his birthday to be 12.05.73. The passport was issued on 05.12.10.
• When Booth said she could get the schematics for Emery's high-tech house, she did so VERY quickly.
• Near the end of the show, when Janssen and his associates, using some radio frequency detector, figured out that Chin Ho was wearing glasses which not only contained a camera but a microphone, why didn't Jerry, who was monitoring the video and audio from these, just turn them off?

Hawaii Five-0: Season 5, Episode 10 Review (S05E10) -- Wāwahi moe‘uhane (Broken Dreams)

(S05E10) Wāwahi moe‘uhane (Broken Dreams)
RATING: 3 stars
Original air date: 1/2/15

This episode was interesting, primarily because of guest star William Forsythe as ex-HPD cop, former friend of McGarrett’s father and now private investigator Harry Brown. As well, the music approached above average because the resident composers tried some new ideas in addition to the usual stock effects like the pizzicato string-like plink-plunk near the beginning in the scene with Jerry and brainiac kid Ani (Youngaisa Wily, son of Kamekona). Hopefully these new musical ideas will not become new clichés! The production values like the photography were well above average throughout.

Forsythe did a great job playing the world-weary detective from Lāna‘i looking for Brooke Waiakea (Delys Kanemura Recca), the daughter of a friend. She had come to Oahu and joined the Manoa Hula Company, a front for an escort agency, and was found murdered after witnessing the killing of one of her clients. Featuring the point-of-view of Brown through a film noir style narration was "something completely different" for the show and it worked well, though it did call attention to itself, as did the opening sequence which was in reverse. Calling attention to itself is not necessarily a bad thing, though you have to wonder why the show waited until its fifth season to get more creative in this fashion.

Unfortunately, the plot of the crime of the week was a veritable fish market with red herrings falling all over each other. By the end of the show, when the "bad guy" was revealed to be Kiana Thompson (Andrea Roth), the boss of the escort agency, I had pretty well lost interest. But then I watched the show again and realized that plot logic once again collapsed near the end. (Bear with me, this is complicated.)

An early suspect in Brooke’s murder was David Waring (Trevor Kuhn), a loser who was involved with multiple lawsuits over failed real estate deals, who was himself murdered as per the above. Waring was engaged to Erica Young (Grace Phipps), whose father, Robert (Doug Savant), was also a client of the escort agency, even though he said he only hired the dancers for a corporate event. Somehow Young found out about Waring’s connection to the agency’s girls. But how did this happen? Did Thompson tell him, maybe because Waring was in the news regarding his engagement to Erica? What was in this for Thompson?

After Brooke witnessed Young murdering Waring, who was pissed that his daughter would marry such a “scumbag,” Brooke took a cab to her house and then called Thompson, who phoned Young to tell him that Brooke had seen what happened (she was hiding in the bathroom at Waring’s place). After Thompson told Young where Brooke was, he went to Brooke's house and killed her, then disposed of her body with his friend Richard Sheridan (Eric Roberts, in a near-cameo role) who “owed him a favor.” Why would Thompson have called Young to tell him all this?

Danno makes some remark that Brooke was "not worth losing two clients over in one night." But she had already "lost" one client -- Waring, who was dead!

There were sub-plots with the Kono/Adam relationship (very brief) and Jerry trying to get a job with the I.T. company Inotech. Both of these were stupid and just took time from the quality aspects of the show. At least there was no "ohana" finale -- a definite plus!

In another useless sequence, McGarrett was seen sparring in a boxing ring with Ellie, his prosecutor friend from episodes five and six. This led to speculation on some fan forums about the usual “where is this relationship going,” though if people listened carefully, they would have heard that Ellie was trying to set McGarrett up on a date with her yet-unseen friend Jess who is “drop-dead gorgeous,” supports the Second Amendment and her favorite movie is The Guns of Navarone, a 1961 war film starring Gregory Peck. McGarrett’s response to Ellie's matchmaking was “I’m just taking my time.”

Speaking of romance, there was a nice scene between Danno and assistant medical examiner Mindy Shaw. She was freaked out by Brooke’s murder, which brought back bad memories from her college years of a friend who disappeared. Whether this is going to lead anywhere is a good question.

MORE TRIVIA:

• The song heard at the end during the flashback of Brooke surfing was Possibility Days by Counting Crows.
• Waring’s drivers license, number 772A043, shows his address as 4399 Dawes Road, Honolulu 96816. His date of birth (also date the license was issued) was 07/18/80. He was 6’1”, weighed 175 pounds and had brown hair and eyes. His license expires on 07/18/20.
• The stereo mix was particularly bad in parts of the show like the dialogue in the scene between Jerry and Ani … but crystal clear when I managed to get a copy of the show which had Dolby Digital sound. Turning on the closed-captions is strongly recommended if you can’t understand … though this particular show’s problem was not the usual complaint about how the music is drowning out the talking. In some of the scene where Chin and Kono were grilling Brooke's roommate Annie Reese (Carlie Casey) there was NO MUSIC AT ALL (very effective).
• In an unusual move for this show, Richard Sheridan demanded to talk to his lawyer when in the blue-lit room.
• According to Michael Timothy, Harry Brown’s car is a 1965 Ford Thunderbird hardtop.
• There were plenty of bad words in this show: “He was really pissed”; “You don’t want to piss this guy off”; “Get the hell out of here”; “Son of a bitch”; “This crazy bastard assaulted me”; “Give me five minutes with this son of a bitch.”
• The opening shot of this episode is similar to the opening shot of the pilot episode of the original series (thanks to Jason from Dallas for pointing this out).