Tom Arnold: Unconvincing Bad Guy

I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this week’s Hawaii Five-0 (Season 3, Episode 10) because it doesn’t merit that much attention.

The setup is that Danno is chaperoning a camping trip for Grace (Teilor Grubbs) and a bunch of other tweens called Aloha Girls. [What, the Girl Scouts didn’t want the product placement?] Steve is along to teach survival skills but, in his usual over-the-top fashion, acts like he’s training a bunch of Navy SEALs – embarrassing Danno and prompting the girls’ snarky adult leader (Lesley Boone) to call him Col. Kurtz (the character from Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now).

One of the girls wanders away from the camp and comes across an injured man (actor/comedian Tom Arnold, from Roseanne and True Lies). Steve comes looking for her, and together they start helping the guy back to the camp for first aid. When Steve’s back is turned, the man pulls a gun on them.

Back in the camp, Steve and Danno start to run a good cop/bad cop routine to rattle the gunman, but it doesn’t work. He shoots Danno in the arm; singles out Steve and the girl who found him, Lucy (Emily Alyn Lind, previously in Revenge and All My Children); and locks the rest in a storage shed. With Steve and Lucy as hostages, he leads them away from the camp in search of … something.

It’s hard to take Arnold seriously playing the bad guy. I’ll buy that Steve let his guard down, but it’s because Arnold is so completely unthreatening. After that, it seemed like Steve could have subdued him just about any time. But that would have made for a really short episode.

Still, much of the plot is ridiculous, starting with the precociousness of the young Aloha Girls:

Grace tunnels out of the shed in which Arnold locked the rest of the group.
Lucy scales a tall tree to retrieve a satchel Arnold is after.
Another girl uses parts from smashed cell phones to assemble a working model Danno can use to call Chin Ho for help.

Adding to the plot’s implausibility:

Arnold’s character somehow disables several vehicles while injured and presumably holding off Steve and Lucy at gunpoint.
The girls’ adult leader just happens to be an emergency-room nurse who creates a teaching moment out of removing the bullet from Danno’s arm.
She also happens to be an expert tracker who helps Danno pursue the gunman and hostages.
When Steve finally does get the drop on Arnold’s character, they’re almost immediately ambushed by a previously unmentioned accomplice (Tom Schanley), who somehow finds them in the middle of nowhere.

So what’s really going on? Seems that Arnold’s character was posing as the security guard for an airborne shipment of diamonds he was supposed to steal. After encountering unexpected resistance from the pilot (who later crashed), he’d tossed the bag of diamonds from the plane and then parachuted to the ground, injuring himself in the process.

The much more menacing accomplice has a much larger gun and is angry about the botched robbery. He shoots Arnold after Steve instigates an argument. Steve and Lucy make a break for it with the diamonds, and he manages to hide her and the satchel in the brush. (Chin Ho later finds her.) But Steve can’t save himself and is looking down the barrel of the accomplice’s gun when Danno catches up and plugs the guy from behind.

The implausible plot points didn’t prevent the episode from being amusing at times. There were no driving scenes, but Danno managed to get into a couple of “hike-uments” with the Aloha Girls’ leader. And Chin Ho really is a maestro of that table-sized information screen at Five-0 headquarters.

Ongoing Story Lines

Episode 10 didn’t advance the McGarrett family saga one iota. What’s really up with Doris? Is Mary Ann still on the island, or did she go home? What’s Wo Fat up to?

The episode’s subplot, such as it was, ever so slightly advanced the story of Kono and her yakuza-gone-legit boyfriend, Adam Noshimuri (Ian Anthony Dale). Adam’s younger brother Michael (Daniel Henney) returns after completing a 10-year prison term and it’s unclear how he feels about Adam’s transition and police-officer girlfriend. There is a creepy ending scene in which he stands over the sleeping Adam and Kono – while fondling Kono’s gun.

Notes

Series regulars Masi Oka and Michelle Borth were absent from Episode 10.
Next week’s Christmas episode will include Star Trek icon George Takei as Chin Ho’s uncle, a moonshiner. On NBC’s Heroes, Takei played the father of Oka’s character.

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