RATING: 2 stars
Original air date: 10/10/14
After an unusual (for this show) "previously on Five-0" segment rehashing threats to Danno regarding his brother, things begin with a trio of women robbing sightseers on a Waikiki Trolley tour bus. This idea is vaguely similar to the old show's seventh season episode A Woman's Work Is With A Gun. There three women desperately in need of money who met during "rap sessions" at the Oahu Women's Center became partners in crime. The threesome in the current episode, on the other hand, rob to support their surfing habit. All of them are disguised as skimpily-dressed tourist types wearing bikinis and attracting far too much attention from some of the men on the bus. (No one on the street seems to pay them much attention, though, when the women are yelling at people during the robbery and flashing guns and the bus has been pulled over to the side of the road.)
One of the passengers on the bus is Nathan Wagner, "president of a major I.T. security firm specializing in encryption, network administration and some type of high-tech firewall." He resists being robbed, and ends up with a bullet in his chest, falling over the double-decker bus's railing on its top level to the street below. It turns out that the three women have competition, because Vanessa Hansen (Erica Piccininni), sitting beside Wagner, had a gun pointed at him and was trying to get his co-operation in breaking into a bank using his cel phone (which one of the bikinied trio steals). After Five-0 arrives on the scene, Hansen pretends to be Wagner's wife Monica, who actually died of cancer five months before.
The old show's episode had some unrealistic forensic work by Che Fong, who blew up pictures to reveal information, and this show has Charlie Fong giving Kono equally far-fetched help, analyzing surf wax and sand in this wax left on the back of Wagner's shirt sleeve during his struggle with one of the robbers. (If you look carefully at this scene, it's debatable whether Keilani Makua (Sumire), the robber who shoots him, actually touches him in this area.) Charlie tells Kono this sand is found in the area of Diamond Head, so Kono is delegated to go undercover at that location since she is supposedly the least visible cop on the team. (But what about the business where she was charged with corruption a few years ago -- didn't this make the papers?).
Kono resists wearing some miniscule swim suit picked out for her by Grover. She soon arrives beside the three women who are waiting off Diamond Head for a wave. Keilani tells her to get lost. After they realize she is a cop (so much for Kono's big cover), Kono engages in a paddleboard pursuit and takes down Lea Nohoa (Allie Gonino) as the Five-O theme is heard in the background in the first of two appearances in the show. Back in the blue-lit room, Lea tells Kono to go to hell and asks for a lawyer.
Meanwhile, the ex-convict Hansen is busy tracking down the trio and trashing their hangout, trying to find Wagner's cel phone, just before Five-0 arrives on the scene. Though Lea is still uncooperative, Five-0 managed to find out about this place through her bellhop cousin who was the one who marked the clothes of intended victims at the Kahala Resort & Spa with some kind of invisible ink. The girls have fled to a "safe house" owned by one of their grandparents ("tutu") in Waimanalo, and Five-0 finds out about this place by telling Lea (who finally cracks) that her pals may be in serious danger. How Hansen finds out about this location (or even the previous one) is never revealed, but she arrives there and shoots Keilani in the stomach. Five-0 shows up, arrests Hansen, and takes the two girls into custody. Keilani survives and this part of the show ends with the threesome on their way to the clink as Kono has a ridiculous narration worthy of Jack Webb in Dragnet. All that is missing is some stern music in the background.
Since the show at this point has seven minutes to go, we continue with the shaggy dog story of Jerry surveilling a bookstore where he suspects the owner of counterfeiting, or as the supposedly serious TV site of cartermatt.com described it, "counter fitting." Jerry has already tried to convince McGarrett that his suspicions are serious, but left the Five-0 office in a pouty mood when rebuffed. Later he makes up with "McGruff," who enlisted the help of the Secret Service in giving the bookstore a clean bill of health. Jerry gets the help of Kamekona with a motivational speech about his "brilliant engineer" father who -- like Pollard in the previous episode -- was paid to shut up about job-related complaints. Kamekona, who describes himself as a "visual" rather than a literary kind of guy, sells a rare book containing a hidden microphone planted by Jerry to the store. I really can't figure out where this plot arc is going, and Jerry's Max-like humorous take on dealing with serious issues is really starting to put him in the category of a character that causes you to cringe every time he appears, like some people experienced with Catherine (who I liked) and Lori (who I did not).
The show bookends with Danno trying to track down either his brother or the $18 million his brother stole. The idea here is to shut up the smirking Marco Reyes, who keeps harassing Danno, even though Danno persistently punches him in the stomach every time he sees him. Using a postcard his brother Matt sent him before he disappeared overseas, Danno figures out that the money is buried between palm trees with an island in the background in a scene which I and many others found highly reminiscent of the finale of the classic comedy-to-end-all-comedies, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Danno digs up the money and the show ends.
MORE TRIVIA:
- The sound mix in this show was very bad at a couple of points, so incomprehensible with the ordinary stereo version of the show that I had downloaded that I then got a Dolby Digital version which was not much better. Near the beginning, the bad sound didn't help the explanation that new medical examiner Mindy Shaw gave of how she figured out Wagner was the trio's intended victim because of something called "ALS." She passed a flashlight-like device over Wagner's shirt, revealing an "X" on the shirt in conjunction with some UV glasses. Is this procedure and its name something that the general public is expected to know? According to WWW pages dealing with this acronym, there are hundreds of possibilities: Advanced Light Source, Ambient Light Sensor, Alternate Light Source, Advanced Launch System, Active Laser Seeker, Advanced Laser System, American Light-wave System, etc. Some of Kono's discussion about the surfing wax with Charlie Fong was also near-impossible to understand.
- What's with the Five-0 team's attitude to Shaw taking on the case without Max's help, and McGarrett addressing her as "kid"? You have to ask if McGarrett thinks he is like her father or something. I didn't find this scene particularly sexist, but awkwardly written.
- The song in the background as Keilani, dressed like Paris Hilton, is shown walking down the street at the beginning of the show is Let's Go by Tiësto. I thought it was pretty funny how her high heels kept her from coming down the bus's stairs quickly after the shooting.
- Hansen's criminal record shows her address as 1432 N. Camac St., Philadelphia 19123.
- The phone number for the Secret Service agent Eric Keane (Zurich Solomon) that McGarrett talks to is 202-555-0143.
- The second instance of the Five-O theme is after the takedown of Hansen and the two women at the end of the show.
- Waikiki Trolley is a real company. A look at their tour buses on their WWW page suggests that the top of their buses normally has some kind of metal frame over the seats (unlike on the show), perhaps where a cover can be put if it is raining.
- Grover has a good suggestion that the team try to track down the location of the tourists' stolen cel phones via their GPSs, but this is seemingly never followed up.
- Classic Five-O star Al Harrington appears briefly as his recurring character Mamo, who has a Surf Rental business. He uses the expression "kanaka maoli" in referring to the three surfing robbers, meaning "native Hawaiians."
- Hansen, pretending to be Wagner's wife, goes to the morgue and, according to Grover, takes Wagner's thumbprint. But does this mean she physically cut it off his thumb or just took a fingerprint? A closeup of the thumb reveals it is covered with something blue which could be ink (it does not look what you would expect), but what good would a mere fingerprint do her if she was trying to match it up with the thumbprint reader on Wagner's yet unrecovered phone?
- Here is Kono's big speech at the end. Talk about bad writing: "For them, life as they knew it was simple. It was waking up every day with a desire to catch a better wave than the day before. The adrenaline you feel paddling out, knowing that at any time you could get the ride of your life. And then there's the rush of walking on water. Only gods do that. Everything they did was to preserve that life. To surf is to get up every day with a desire to battle something greater than yourself. And those girls just wanted to ride that wave as long as they could. And now their endless summer is over."
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