RATING: 2 stars
Original air date: 05/08/15
This show, first of a double-header for the season finale, began with another two-part "previously on Five-0."
The first of these flashed back to seasons one and two with scenes between Danno and his ex-wife Rachel (Claire van der Boom) who reappeared in this episode. We find out later that Charlie, the baby boy that Rachel had delivered in or around S02E14 is not Stan's child at all, but Danno's. Rachel didn't want Danno to know this because she didn't want two kids to potentially grow up without a father in the event something happened to Danno.
This all pisses Danno off immensely, who describes what Rachel has done as "unforgiveable" because he has been deprived of the kid's presence for three years. This results in some high-powered emoting between Danno and Rachel, as well Danno and McGarrett, who gives his partner some advice about putting his anger aside, telling Danno that "parents shouldn't fight."
It turns out that Charlie is suffering from HLH (full name: hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis), a life-threatening condition where cells of the immune system don’t work properly to destroy infected or damaged cells as they should. One of the treatments for this condition involves a bone-marrow transplant, which is where Danno comes in.
The second flashback was to Chin Ho receiving the pictures of Adam and some mysterious Asian guy left for him by Gabriel in S05E21. This segued into the present, with Chin Ho being dropped off on Sand Island by a couple of Japanese-speaking dudes, who tell him to keep a hood on his head until he has counted to twenty (does Chin speak Japanese?).
Although Chin already showed the photos to McGarrett in a previous episode, Chin then goes to McGarrett's house and reveals some "intel" that he got about the pictures, presumably from these Japanese guys: namely, that the older man in the photos with Adam is Goro Shioma, a Tokyo financier who helped bankroll Adam's deceased (really now-deceased, I think) father Hiro. Shioma is also an oyabun (big shot) of a major yakuza organization.
How this was all explained to Chin Ho is not made clear. I don't know why Chin didn't just run the pictures of Shioma through Five-0's Supercomputer facial recognition program, since it seems to be able to figure who just about anyone in the world is.
Then we jump to the crime of the week.
An HPD cop stops some guy (actually a bounty hunter named Greg Farmer (Matt Lasky)) in the middle of nowhere because his car's tail light is malfunctioning. The cop wants to look in the trunk to see if there's a loose wire (is he just using this as an excuse?), which freaks out Farmer. Later we see what happened thanks to the cop's dashboard cam which has the same date as that of the show -- May 8, 2015: the cop opened the trunk and extracted another guy from there, who is Andrew Pelham (Robert Curtis Brown), alias David Sutter, an ex-cop wanted on the mainland for brutal homicides involving torture a couple of years before.
Five-0 tracks Sutter down to an apartment at 2026 Anakole Place in Pearl City (ZIP 96782) thanks to some asphalt residue from both Pelham's and Farmer's shoes (turns out that a city works crew was repairing the street in front of Pelham's house the light before -- sheesh). Of course, when they arrive, Pelham is not there, but another bounty hunter, the bearded Richie Malloy is, also searching for Pelham, who has a $40,000 reward on his head.
After some initial misunderstandings which result in Malloy being handcuffed, Malloy is let go, though I suspected that this was not the last we would see of him. And it turns out that later, after Five-0 tracks Pelham down to an apartment when he tries to use another one of his aliases to buy an airline ticket out of the country, Malloy shows up, thanks to a cel phone he taped to the underside of McGarrett's car (which he could follow with the GPS). Malloy shoots Pelham in what looks like a pretty serious manner with his shotgun and tucks the fugitive into his car. Malloy is after more than the $40,000 bounty, though. His financial records reveal that $300,000 has been put into his bank account from Malcolm Leddy (Robert Curtis Brown), father of Jennifer, one of Pelham's victims.
Malloy has turned Pelham over to Leddy, who, using knowledge from his studies years before at medical school, prepares to give Pelham the same sadistic treatment given to Jennifer in the basement of a rented Oahu house.
The scenes that followed were, to be blunt, kind of a mess (no pun intended in advance).
Letty has Pelham shackled in the basement of the house hanging from the ceiling; Pelham's feet (which have no socks or shoes) are not tied up.
Letty removes one of Pelham's hands from the shackles and uses pliers to squeeze his finger, perhaps breaking it. Then Letty tries to cut off Pelham's scalp, but freaks out and, in frustration, pushes the table with all the knives and other torture implements so everything falls on the floor.
At this point, from one angle, it looks like there is nothing close to Pelham, though from another angle there might be something. I don't think it is the knife later shown in closeup, and, in any case, I think it is highly unlikely that Pelham can reach the knife.
In order to do this, he would have to s-t-r-e-t-c-h, grab the knife with his feet and then somehow get this knife into his free hand (which has a severely damaged finger), while hanging from the ceiling by one hand! He certainly could not reach the knife on the floor with just his hand while hanging from the ceiling.
Assuming he does all this, Pelham gets the knife and cuts off his own thumb to escape from the shackles, then attacks and seriously injures Letty, and then somehow manages to stick his hand (without a thumb) back through the shackles to look like he was hanging from the ceiling!
At one point, Letty starts to go upstairs, either to -- as Pelham mockingly says -- call the cops, or just to cool off. At this point, you cannot see a knife on the floor in front of Pelham at all.
After McGarrett comes downstairs, he finds the father on the floor, with Pelham's cut-off thumb under him.
Whether the attack on Letty happened upstairs or downstairs is a good question, because when Five-0 shows up at the house, a lot of stuff on the main floor is broken. But then why would Pelham cut off his thumb, come upstairs and attack Letty, and not just leave the house right then, instead dragging the father's body downstairs and stringing himself up in the shackles again? The upstairs scenario also makes you wonder why the thumb was under Letty downstairs (so does the downstairs scenario, actually).
Once again, there is some critical scene in a show where everything after depends on it, and it goes off the rails at that point (up to then, the show was quasi-passable). Just a bit of care with the continuity, like showing how Pelham got the knife to cut off his thumb, etc., and it would have made much more sense ... well, maybe.
MORE TRIVIA:
- There is a big goof in the sequence near the beginning of the show where the cop encounters the bounty hunter Farmer.
These are the times from the dashboard cam in the cop's car:
2:08:32 - The bounty hunter's car is stopped
2:08:36 - Cop approaches car from the rear
2:08:41 - Cop opens the trunk
2:08:51 - Bad guy comes out of trunk, punches cop
2:08:53 - Bad guy grabs cop's gun, shoots him
2:09:04 - Bad guy shoots bounty hunter, who is handcuffed to steering wheel
2:09:06 - Bad guy pulls bounty hunter out of car, seemingly without removing handcuff
2:09:21 - Bad guy leaves in the car
If you watch the sequence where the cop approaches the car and talks to the bounty hunter about the tail light, there is around ONE MINUTE of conversation. In the dashboard cam footage, there are only 5 SECONDS from the time the cop approaches the car until he opens the trunk.
There is no explanation as to how the handcuffs are removed. - At the beginning of the show, Chin tells McGarrett that Kono is getting married to Adam in three days. When later asked by Danno if he is bringing a date to the wedding like his prosecutor friend Ellie, McGarrett starts waffling, saying he is "not ready to jump into something with somebody else."
- Charlie is supposedly three years old, but looks older. A friend of mine has a four-year-old daughter who looks younger than Charlie!
- At the beginning, as Farmer is driving, he is listening to Jackson Browne's "Running on Empty." The license number of Farmer's car is TY8 814, which cannot be traced by Five-0 at the scene of the pullover, which is weird, because it looks like a real plate.
- Malloy's New York driver's license #548 968 14L shows his address as 264 Sandra Drive, Buffalo, NY 14229. His date of birth is 04-10-71, and the license was issued on 4-10-14.
- When tracking down Pelham, Grover uses computer data bases to find out that Pelham paid cash for six months rent in advance on his Pearl City apartment. Why would this very nosy information be available in a computer at all, or is this information that Grover entered into the computer after he found this out from Pelham's landlord?
- In a scene full of boring expository dialogue, Kono and Chin Ho track down the car that Pelham stole from Farmer, which has been torched and abandoned at the Ke'ehi Lagoon. This location has no camera surveillance of any kind. They surmise that Pelham sucked gas out of the car into a plastic container using a rubber hose and then set the car on fire. One wonders why he would bother to commit such an elaborate cover-up, risking his own health like this.
- Danno hears from Rachel when he and McGarrett are at Pelham's home, and McGarrett tells Danno to drop everything to go and see her. But they only have the one car!
- Chin Ho watches a crimestoppers-type video made around the time of Jennifer's murder from TV station WNKW, which has a tip line of 555-0144.
- Dog the Bounty Hunter makes a short appearance when McGarrett and Danno need some "professional advice" on how a bounty hunter would get someone off the island under the radar. Dog uses some peculiar expression, saying "So this is on the DL, right?" presumably meaning this is "off the record." Dog tells them that a local cargo airline, Trans Air, will do this kind of transaction for cash with no questions asked.
- The $300,000 that Molloy receives from Leddy goes to his bank account #363516847-326, transaction ID D-36705.
- Bad word alert -- McGarrett on the phone to Leddy: "We've got enough evidence to put this bastard [Pelham] away."
- As they are in bed at the beginning of the show, Danno's girl friend Melissa, formerly Amber, asks if they can have macadamia nut pancakes at the Wailana Coffee House, an actual Honolulu restaurant.
- A search of Pelham's house finds seven bogus drivers' licenses, including Arizona: Jacob Heyman, 3013 E. Sheena Dr., Phoenix, AZ 85022; Wisconsin: Daniel Lack, 4160 County Road M, Madison, WI 53719; Wyoming: Brad Voight; Missouri: Tommy Lukas; and Nevada: Paul Vickars, 2704 Swenson St., Las Vegas, NV 89109. He uses the alias of Jeremy Gehring to book a flight on Paxana Airlines, ticket number 28389303091, flight no. PWA 22, seat 248, Y/Conf class, departing 7:15 PM from Honolulu on May 8, 2015 and arriving at 2:22 PM at Wattay International Airport, Vientiane, Laos.
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