By Stu Robinson,

After a couple of milquetoast episodes, CBS’ Hawaii Five-0 brought some meat to the luau in Episode 14.

Joe comes clean and reveals Shelbourne’s identity. Danno helps his ex-wife deliver her baby. The ambush of a delivery truck leads to a terrorist threat.

The episode begins with a flashback to 1992 and the day McGarrett’s father sent him away to the mainland. “It’s not safe for you here anymore,” Jack McGarrett (William Sadler) tells young Steve.

Before we get into the details, let’s review the two lackluster preceding episodes for their contribution to the back story.

Episode 12

CBS hyped the wedding of Chin Ho and Malia, but that was just a scene tacked onto the end. The episode begins with an homage to The Goonies – Gratuitous Corey Feldman shoutout! – as three boys enter a dark, old military bunker. They unpack climbing gear and start dropping down a hole into an uncharted lava tube below.

Where, of course, they stumble upon a body.

McGarrett, Danno, Chin Ho, Joe White and Kamekona are being sized for wedding tuxes when the call comes in. Arriving at the scene, they find Max wearing a spelunking getup, complete with a spotlight on his hard hat. This formula of Max + Goofy Outfit = Humor is wearing thin.

McGarrett and Max repel down to the body, which bears a gunshot wound and damage from the fall. They attempt to turn the body over and are startled when the victim moves his head and moans. This stiff isn’t so stiff! He’s still alive despite being shot, dropped down a hole and left for 12 hours.

(I wonder if the girls in the 2009 movie Sorority Row considered that possibility when they pitched a presumed-dead Audrina Patridge down a similar hole. Eh, who am I kidding? People from reality TV never go away. They’re like the undead, but with better skin.)

Back on Oahu, the episode unwinds into a depressing story of a couple lowlifes scamming the parents of a young man who was presumed murdered, but whose body never was found. They lure the father to Honolulu with $50,000 in cash using a story that the missing son had been seen on the island. Dad starts to smell the scam and ends up in the lava tube; one of the scammers is found dead in a car trunk.

Meanwhile, Joe’s behavior becomes ever more squirrelly. The week before, he kidnapped Hiro Noshimuri, leader of the yakuza on the islands, in order to gain information about the mysterious Shelbourne. He’s last seen driving away with the crime boss in his car trunk. Now the mobster’s son, Adam (Ian Anthony Dale), wants answers, but Joe claims he doesn’t know where the father is. McGarrett also discovers that Joe has made a quick trip to Japan and back. Joe refuses to explain, again asserting that he’s trying to protect Steve.

Other details worth noting:

• Tom Sizemore returns as police Capt. Vince Fryer. He is investigating the body in the car trunk while Five-0 is trying to identify the comatose man from the hole. They agree to pool resources, but their differing styles make that interesting. Heightening the contrast is the way Fry always appears pale, wearing a pale-colored (usually blue) suit and filmed in pale light – while the Five-0 team, excluding Danno, is a tanned, colorful bunch.
• Gail O’Grady (NYPD Blue) plays the wife of the comatose guy from the hole.

Quotes:

Episode 13

Episode 13, which involves the murder of a teenage girl in her own bedroom, never gives viewers the chance to solve its central crime. Getting to the killer and motive requires so many degrees of separation that Kevin Bacon wouldn’t figure it out.

Meanwhile, Joe is back from another mysterious trip to Japan (on Hawaiian Airlines, of course) but drawing increased attention from the local yakuza over is refusal to explain Hiro’s disappearance. Adam Noshimuri wants answers about his father’s fate, and is willing to get them legally or extralegally.

After McGarrett rescues Joe from a mob beating, Joe asserts that he helped Hiro fake his own death. But that leaves us no closer to the identity of Shelbourne – and wondering where Wo Fat has been hiding since the North Korea episode.

In other news:

• Lab technician Charlie Fong (Brian Yang) has another chance to show off his forensics expertise for Kono.
• Another Lost cast member, Sam Anderson, turns up on Oahu as a shady jury-selection expert.
• We got a “Book ’em, Danno,” and it came organically, not tacked on at the end of the episode.
• Once again: Good guys drive Chevys; bad guys drive Fords.

Episode 14

In the opening flashback, McGarrett is told by his father: “If anything happens, you can always trust your Uncle Joe.”

The advice clearly doesn’t square with Joe’s recent behavior. We see McGarrett tailing Joe to an antiques shop, which is closed. After trying the door, Joe walks away into an alley, where he and McGarrett have a confrontation. But Steve can’t get anything out of him until later, after Joe has survived a yakuza drive-by shooting while barely saving a bystander. McGarrett arranges a meeting with Joe and Adam Noshimuri. Adam is ready to kill Steve and Joe, but the latter pulls out a cell phone, hits speed dial and hands it over. Adam listens briefly, presumably to his very-much-alive father, Hiro. Joe then explains that he helped Hiro fake his death because he had become a loose end to Wo Fat. Hire figured that if Wo Fat though he was dead, he’d move on and leave Adam alone.

Meanwhile, the investigation of the delivery-truck ambush points to the very same antiques shop. Steve and Joe return, and this time they break in. The find the proprietor, a known forger, in the rear with a gunshot wound. He is conscious, and tells them two terrorist suppliers stole blank U.S. passports from the truck, forced him to complete them and planned to sell them to the highest bidders. With help from, you guessed it, Hawaiian Airlines, Five-0 captures the two suppliers in a jetway at the airport.

So, where is Danno while all this takes place? He’s at the hospital with ex-wife Rachel (Claire van der Boom). She has gone into early labor with the baby fathered by her second husband, who is out of town on business. While their daughter, Grace (Teilor Grubbs), waits in the lounge, Danno coaches Rachel through the birth of the other man’s child – with Rachel shooting him appreciative looks throughout. Later, we see Danno outside the nursery taking photos to send to the baby’s father.

Comic relief in the episode comes from the team’s decision to spring Sang Min (Will Yun Lee), everybody’s favorite human trafficker, from prison to take part in an undercover operation. “Holy mullet! Who’s this guy?” Lori Weston asks upon seeing

Sang Min’s mug shot. When Lori and Kono visit the prison to recruit Sang Min, he greets them with, “Oh, look at this! Sweet and Spicy, huh?” He agrees to cooperate on one condition, at which point he leers at the two woman and says he’s been in prison a long time and has needs.

What he needs, it turns out, is shrimp from Kamekona’s food truck. We next see him chowing down at a picnic table near the beach, garishly disguised in a promotional T-shirt and hat from the Komekona Collection and pausing between bites to proposition passing bikini babes. He gets serious and rises to his feet when McGarrett walks up. There is a moment of awkward hostility before McGarrett breaks down in laughter. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I know you want to do the whole dramatic staredown thing, but I can’t take you seriously in this getup.” I actually wonder if that was scripted, or a blooper that the director thought was too good not to use.

Less amusing was an adjacent scene at the same location. I’ve noted from the start that the new Hawaii Five-0 is rather heavy-handed with product placement. It has pushed the line so far, it was hard to imagine how it could cross over. But the writers found away. So how much product placement is too much? After finding an “Out to lunch” sign on Kamekona’s shrimp truck, our heroes walk around back and find him at a table piled with Subway sandwiches. The big man tells McGarrett he’s “trying to eat smarter, brother. It worked for Jared, and that boy was huge.” Kamekona continues like he’s reading the script for a Subway commercial: “The best thing about it? They make it any way you want it!”

Puh-lease! Placement and promotion are enough; leave the full-blown commercials for the commercial breaks.

The Big Revelation

Near the end of Episode 14, Steve and Joe visit Jack McGarrett’s grave at Oahu’s famous Punchbowl cemetery. There Joe reveals that Shelbourne isn’t real – that he killed Wo Fat’s father, which Joe and Jack pinned on the fictitious Shelbourne. So Wo Fat has Daddy issues too. Who knew? Besides Joe, I mean.

After telling the story of Shelbourne, Joe informs Steve that it’s his turn to go away for a while. Will Joe return? The season finale would be a good bet.

So, let’s review everyone’s Daddy issues:

• McGarrett – Being sent away to a mainland military school as a boy. Hearing his father’s murder over the phone. Constant clues to his father’s unfinished business. And an inner need to carry out his father’s legacy, wherever it might lead. (To a lesser extent, the same issues dog McGarrett’s younger sister, Mary Ann.)
• Danno – A divorced, non-custodial parent’s determination to be as much of a father has he can to his young daughter. For Danno, that involves moving from New Jersey to Hawaii and maintaining a complex relationship with his ex-wife.
• Hiro Noshimuri – Under threat from Wo Fat, the former yakuza boss fakes his own death. Like Papa McGarrett, he doesn’t want his business to endanger his son.
• Wo Fat – Like McGarrett, he’s after the person who killed his father.

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Stu Robinson, a college friend of the TV Tyrant, is a writer, editor, media-relations practitioner and social-media guy based in Phoenix.