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.