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.
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