The episode begins with a high speed police chase. The police are chasing a muscle car through city streets and then into a shipping yard. They lose the car there and eventually find it inside a shipping container with dozens of other stolen cars. In one of those cars they find a dead body… a man with a heavily bandaged face and a gun shot through the chest.

News of the case comes to Steve while he is hashing things out with Danny, his new roomie. Danny apparently doesn’t like all the rules and regulations and Steve doesn’t like being awakened in the night by infomercials. Their differences are temporarily forgotten while they work this new case. At the scene, Max tells them the victim has had fingerprints sanded off, leaving them to believe that perhaps the killer did not want the man to be identified and that they will find his face a mess as well. Their only lead thus far is the presence of all the stolen cars and the popular idea is that the car thieves killed the man.

Back at the lab Steve and Danny have a hard time getting information from Max who apparently is mad at Steve/Danny and is giving them the cold shoulder. He is chatty with Lori though and tells her that the man had just had plastic surgery, which would mean the victim was trying to change his identity. He plans to run the implants found in the man’s face against a medical database to see if they can track the surgeon. They do track him and the good doctor tells them he changed the mans’s entire face and that he was paid in cash. The victim insisted on complete privacy and did not even give a real name or address.

Chin Ho and Kono follow the stolen cars lead and through their informant they are able to narrow in on the ring stealing the cars. They place an order for a muscle car and Lori goes undercover in skin tight hot pants and drives that hot car to some sort of car show so she can lure their thief into stealing it. The thief takes the bait and asks Lori if she would like to go for a ride with him. Then an accomplice fakes a carjacking when they stop at a light. Lori is tossed out of the car and the thieves think they have gotten away when the car doors lock and the engine is cut off remotely. The 5-0 team makes an arrest. In interrogation the thief admits to stealing the car in question but he claims that he found it on the roadside, keys still in it. He grabbed it and put it in a shipping container. He had no idea there was a body in the trunk. He gives the 5-0 team a duffle bag he found in the car when he nabbed it. Inside the bag is a hotel key card.

When Steve and Danny go to investigate the hotel room they find the man’s girlfriend. She claims his name was Adam and that he worked on a cable ship. He called her to tell her that he was in trouble (something from his past) and they needed to make an escape. The plan was to meet her at the hotel and run but he never made an appearance. This leads Steve and Danny to the ship where he worked and when Lori tells them she found out the victim was actually named Jimmy and he was on the run from the Boston Irish Mob, they have an idea who to look for. Jimmy’s roommate was from Boston and when 5-0 comes on board he takes a hostage and tries to run but Steve puts a kibosh on that idea. The man owed a debt to the mob and when he recognized Jimmy he phoned the mob to inform them where he was, paying off his debt.

Lori and Chin Ho track the likely hitmen, the O’Toole brothers, on an incoming flight and they are discovered at the girlfriend’s hotel room. One is shot dead and the other is wounded. The girlfriend tells 5-0 that the hitmen were interrogating her about Jimmy’s whereabouts so they obviously did not kill him. Back to square one. The living hitman tells them that they were in Hawaii to “chat” with Jimmy and that they lost him inside a parking structure the previous day.

Chin Ho goes over video footage from the parking garage and finds that a man used his private key card to leave the structure 2 times in one day… most likely using his card to leave with his own car and then doubling back to remove the victim’s car. It is the plastic surgeon. Steve and Danny go to his office and pull him out of surgery. He operated solo on Jimmy per the victim’s wishes and the man ended up dying on the table. In fear the doctor decided to shoot him through the chest and plant the body in the trunk of his own car so that it would look like his past caught up with him. Case closed.

Steve and Danny are at headquarters discussing Danny’s new residence when Lori walks by dressed up as Sandy from Grease. The boys fall all over themselves to get out to her and find she is ready for movie night at Max’s house. He invited the boys to but they thought his email was spam and ignored it, hence the cold shoulder. Max walks by them, dressed as Danny Zuko, and takes Lori by the arm. They walk off together leaving Steve and Danny to stare dumbfounded. Priceless!

Best parts: The last one obviously and I also liked when Steve got the surgeon’s attention by using his gun to tap on the glass. I also noticed more vampire love. Yeah, I am a total vampire groupie. If you recall we have already seen three vampires on the show… Steve of course (Mick St. John), Lorena from True Blood, and Pearl from Vampire Diaries. In this eppy the surviving Irish hitman was once Markus from Underworld Evolution. AND although not a vampire, another True Blood alum was in this episode as the cable crew leader, also known as Andy from True Blood. This show certainly nods to sci-fi quite a bit.

This episode begins with two guys getting some hang time in the ocean. They are nearly killed when a plane crash lands into the water. The pilot Monica, was an immigration and customs (ICE) agent and was dead when it crashed.

At the scene Lori introduces the team to Jeff Morrison, Monica’s supervisor. He and Lori use to work together on a Federal Task Force. Jeff is concerned about foul play because Monica was not scheduled to fly. Max determines that she was poisoned (Pufferfish) and her death was 8 hours prior. Steve knows from the plane type and its fuel capacity that she had to have been dead many hours before that plane took off. She had been killed, loaded in the plane, and the pilot jumped leaving the plane to crash and hopefully cover up any evidence.

The team goes to Monica’s home to look for her Red Book, which has extensive notes about what she was working on. They enter and Danny takes an immediate liking to her dog and ends up bringing it back to headquarters and on the job with him. They find the book but it has pages missing, which Lori knows that an ICE agent would not do. They figure that maybe her killer broke in and stole the pages. They also find her camera and they analyze some surveillance photos the agent took. They ID a man who appears in many of them, Leo Miller. They speak with Leo and he insists that he is only a recovering cancer patient was trying to help her nail a local smoke shop that sells medicinal marijuana and isn’t picky about whether or not you have a marijuana card. Kono and Chin Ho go undecover to explore that angle but it ends up being a dead end.

Lori finds a new lead named Jason who left a print on the Red Book. He also makes an appearance in the smoke shop surveillance video. Jason runs from the 5-0 team when they try to question him, making Steve have to go all commando to bring him down. Turns out he didn’t want to be caught with a bag full of drugs. He insists that he only makes deliveries for clients but has no special knowledge of the content. He admits that he was an informant for Monica and that he tipped her off to an area of the customs house that had some hot activity. When he found out she was dead he broke into her home and stole the pages from her Red Book so that he would not be outed as a snitch.

The team gets info from the plane’s black box and Steve’s theory about a pilot bailing out proves correct. Lori pinpoints the area in which he would have jumped but it is very dense so Steve asks her and Chin Ho to grab some quads, traverse the jungle, and find the location where the killer jumped/landed. They find an abandoned parachute still hanging from a tree and motorcycle tire tracks leaving the area. Chin Ho can tell from the tracks that it was an old Triumph motorcycle.

The rest of the team checks out the building that the snitch led Monica to and they find an illegal animal poaching operation. They find animals and exotic ingredients like pufferfish poison and bear bile… which is used in alternative healing. Max tips them off to the fact that Jason’s confiscated bag had some pills with shark cartilage which leads them to Chinatown and an alternative medicine and herb shop. The doctor who runs the place is gone and when they see signs of a struggle and lots of blood they know it was foul play.

Chin Ho puts the pieces together for them when he finds that Leo Miller, the cancer patient that Monica photographed, was an owner of an old triumph motorcycle, like the one the killer used to get away. The guy is a pilot and an experienced jumper. Since he also has cancer he is a likely user of rare Chinese medicine and herbs. The team enters his home and waits for him to come home. When they ambush him he finally admits to killing Monica and also kidnapping the Chinese doctor. He was a patient of the doctor and had been convinced that the medicine was healing him. When the ICE agent threatened to shut the operation down and keep him from the medicine he needed, he killed her. Afterwards he found out his cancer had spread and decided to teach the good doctor a lesson by loading him up on Chemo drugs until he died. He tells the 5-0 team where he hid the man and they find him in the nick of time.

Danny ends up giving the dog to his daughter and the dead ICE agent receives the Medal of Valor for her service.

Best parts of the episode would have to be the dog riding shotgun while Steve sat in the back of the car, when he finds out the dog took a dump in his office, and when Max and Jeff try to determine if they know each other from somewhere else (ala Heroes), funny stuff.

This episode begins with two documentary filmmakers exploring a historical site that is believed by the locals to be inhabited by the spirits of their ancestors. They are looking for the Night Marchers, warrior spirits who some have claimed to see at this sacred place. The female documentarian trips and lands on a duffle bag with something alarming in it. She begins screaming first at that and then at something behind her partner as they are apparently attacked by someone or… something.

Meanwhile Danny is taking Grace trick or treating at his hotel. She is not into it and luckily for her Danny is called away on police business. He meets up with the the rest of the team at the crime scene and even though they tell him he needs to wait for a priest to bless them before they can access the scene he decides to explore the area anyway. And of course he has to sneer at the idea of spirits cursing him for good measure. He is rewarded later with a huge rock lodged in his front car window. On the way back to headquarters he and Steve have a spirited debate about the idea of a higher power and an afterlife.

At headquarters Max, dressed like Neo from the Matrix, informs them that the female victim was killed with a shovel blow to the head and the male victim was buried alive. A print was found on the lens of her glasses but the print was identified as that of a man who died a week previous. They go to the burial site of their dead suspect and find his coffin is empty. They also hear from a friend of the victims that a man had been bothering them at the sacred site where they were filming. He attacked them at some point and was knocked to the ground and hit his head pretty badly. The team wonders if this man might have wanted a little revenge.

While they are investigating the reappearing dead guy they visit the apartment where he was supposedly shot. Danny speaks with a kindly older woman outside who tells him an apartment is available. This gives him the idea to convince the landlord to lease him the dead guy’s apartment for a bargain price.

After looking at the video feed from the documentarian’s camera they figure out that the print got on the female victim’s glasses when she fell face first on a duffle bag that had a severed hand in it. Someone was likely trying to get rid of the dead guy’s remains when the documentary filmmakers stumbled upon the grisly scene and were killed before they could talk. They also find a dozen or so other bodies when they do a thorough scan of the area. But who had motive?

After a visit to the scene Danny finds his other car window smashed in. Rather than believe he is cursed he figures out that it may have been a homeless man that warned them away from the scene. He and Steve go venturing into the forest to look for the guy and they find him, complete with camp, tent, and bloody machete. The blood turns out to be animal blood though and the homeless guy seems pretty harmless. He is just trying to protect an area he considers sacred. He ominously tells Danny that anyone who doesn’t respect the place opens a door and the dead will seek them out.

Max gives them a new lead when he tells them all the bodies found were already dead prior to being buried at that hallowed ground. He found that some tissue and ligaments were removed to sell on the black market. They were all buried at the same place leading them to the funeral director as a suspect. When they get to the funeral home though they find the director has been embalmed alive and Lori is attacked from behind by the culprit… the funeral director’s partner in crime.

After establishing that Lori is a-okay they get back to business and they use the info they found at the scene to track their killer. He works at a hospital and did not show up to work but from his financials they see he bought a property recently. That is where they track him down. He is living in some sort of warehouse with lots of lye. When the man is surprised by their presence he opens a lighter and sets himself on fire. The lye explodes and takes the whole building down. The 5-0 team gets out okay of course.

At the end of the episode the team is helping Danny move into his new apartment, which he must have gotten for a steal. Kono and Lori are carrying boxes and Chin Ho and Steve are carrying in a brand new mattress. Danny is marveling at all the free labor he managed to wrangle up. The landlord makes an entrance and Danny asks about getting a dog. When the lady tells him he cannot have a dog he reminds her of the older lady with the cute dog who told him about the apartment.  With much confusion the landlord tells him he is describing a tenant who passed away when she fell down the elevator shaft. When Danny discovers that he was tipped off to the apartment by a dead lady, he bolts and tells his friends to pack it up because he out of there.

This was a light hearted and fun episode. Not my fave but it had its moments. Also couldn’t help but notice the subtle hints that Steve may be a bit more than professionally interested in his new team member Lori.

What did you think?

This week’s episode was probably my fave of all time. I am very much an action chick and this episode was action packed. My husband is usually pretty ambivalent about the show but this week he was GLUED to the screen and even made a comment about not walking away so he wouldn’t miss anything. Yeah… we likey.

It begins by starting at the end. McGarrett is about to enter a cage fighting ring. Lori is helping him prep and perhaps showing that she is starting to develop a soft spot for her boss. I think she admires and respects him more than she initially thought she would and she likes the side of him that would go into this fight so that made me curious about the motivation for it. Danno thinks Steve is going to get his ass handed to him so he tries to convince him to back out before he gets hurt.

Then we move backward 48 hours…

Steve is meeting with Joe and NCIS agent Kensi, that Joe enlisted for help in deciphering the audio from the video of Wo Fat and Steve’s Dad. Kensi tells them that they are discussing “Shelburn” but no one has any idea who or what that is. Before Steve can discuss at length he gets called away to a case.

A man (Jake) is shot in the chest and then dumped in the pool. His home is also robbed and the MO fits with a slew of robberies in the area. Victims were tied to a chair, interrogated in front of loved ones and then robbed. No one had been killed in those robberies though. In true Daddy fashion, Danno is consumed by the fact that the victim was a father and he makes sure to break the news to the tween son.

They start by tracking the robbers and they do that by narrowing in on what they had in common. All victims ate at high end restaurants in the weeks before the robbery. After interviewing one of the victimized families they narrow in on a valet company that is used at all the restaurants. They figure out which employees worked on the night these family’s ate and those same employees were NOT working at the time of the robberies. The criminals copied the house keys of their intended victims and then pre-approved the housewares while the families were not home. The 5-0 team figures they targeted Jake’s home because he dined at these restaurants and owned them as well.

They raid the house of one suspected criminal who has a record and they find surveillance photos of the homes being hit. They find one they don’t recognize and are able to track it down. When they get there it is being robbed by the masked men they seek and they successfully arrest them all. The ring leader is adamant though that they did not hit Jake’s house. He tells the 5-0 team that he didn’t know Jake, only his sister, who was ousted from the restaurants a few months before. This tidbit gives them incentive to look into the victim’s sister. They find out she left management of her brother’s restaurants and was instead given a position at his charitable organization for keeping kids off the street. They also find out that upon Jake’s death his estate is settled upon his son, with Auntie controlling it until he is 25. This looks like motive.

Joe arranges a meeting for himself and Steve with the man who lead them to the video. Just after he gets off the phone with McGarrett about the meet Joe is attacked in his apartment by Wo Fat. A knock down drag out fight ensues after Wo fat makes it clear he intends to kill Joe and then Steve. Joe is very nearly killed but he manages to get the upper hand at the last moment but Wo Fat escapes.

Steve and Danny ask the sister some questions about her motive for killing her brother. She insists that she was not fired and that she volunteered to work for her brother’s charity. They also ask if she owns a gun and she tells them about a gun they kept at the gym they run the charity out of. They confiscated it from a gym member and kept it in an office desk. When they go to the gym to apprehend the gun, it is missing. The only other person who knew about the gun besides Jake, the sister, and the brother in law was a fighter who had been trying to get sponsor money out of Jake so he could go pro. When they get to his home they find his Jeep outside and the missing gun on the floor board. The guy spots them and runs but McGarrett is able to go hand to hand with the guy and bring him down, breaking his arm in the process. But when he is putting the cuffs on Steve spots a hospital band on the guy’s wrist that places him at the hospital during time of death. An interrogation further convinces them of his innocence and instead makes them suspect the brother in law, Marshall, who was encouraging gym fighters to hit up Jake for money so they could go pro and he could manage their careers and pocket 20% of their earnings. Marshall also had an opportunity to plant the gun.

A little research leads them to a store surveillance video where Marshall is buying up duct tape and cleaning supplies around Jake’s time of death. They arrest him at the gym and he admits to his wife that he tried to shake Jake down for money so that they would be financially independent. They fought and Jake ended up getting shot so Marshall tried to make it look like a robbery gone bad.

This brings us back to the cage fight. Steve stepped in for the fighter he injured since it was a charity match and the charity was a fighter down. Now the admiration in Lori’s eyes makes even more sense.  Steve fights and does a tremendous job, for which his team pats him on the back later.

After the fight he meets with Joe and they find John McGarrett’s friend was tortured and killed by Wo Fat after he attacked Joe. The episode ends with Joe voicing his concerns that their investigation got this man killed and that more could get killed if they don’t back off.

This eppy had LOTS of action and it had the right amount of Steve versus Wo Fat story line. It is getting really interesting. A+ episode from me.

Other thoughts – I like Lori and so far the fans bashing her are not swaying me. Her scenes with Steve this week were spot on. I noticed that Kono was very underused which isn’t bothering me because she has bored me to tears so far this season…which is all in the writing I am sure. I wonder if there could be truth to the rumors that she wants to leave the show and they are slowly phasing her out. If not, I am confused about what exactly they are doing with her character. I hope Joe’s proclamation about Wo Fat killing people is not a warning for us.

Photo by Rae Huo of Popiroiro.com, Official HIFF Photographer

The Hawaii International Film Festival hosted an afternoon with the H50 Cast yesterday. The line-up featured executive producer Peter Lenkov, director Steve Boyum, and cast members Alex O’Loughlin, Daniel Dae Kim, Grace Park, Lauren German and Taylor Wily. Here is a tidbit from the Q&A:

Le: I like that all the characters are all flawed. Where do you pull from to build your character?

O’Loughlin: Oh I can’t tell you that. That’s like asking Anthony Bourdain how he makes his secret lobster bisque. It’s like as an actor… it’s a funny art form. If you’re an artist, you paint. If you’re a musician, you play a score. There’s something very tangible and specific about what you do. If you play the wrong note, you’re not playing the piece correctly, whereas with what we do, there are so many different interpretations of a role or a scene. That’s what makes casting so important. Sometimes you watch a movie and it’s just not quite right. Sometimes it’s down to just interpretation. I trained for three years in Sydney at the National Institute of Dramatic Arts. I learned a lot. I guess it was the pinnacle of my training… I have a way that I work as an artist; you go to your experience. If you are good at what you do, you find a way to turn the objective experience into a subjective study tool.

The funny thing about television is… you get the material, and you’re working the next day. You don’t have time to go full Stanislavsky and go into the forest and grow a beard and do all that stuff that we thespians like to do. It’s almost like cold reading. It’s an instinct mechanism that gets stronger. It’s a muscle as well that gets stronger the more you do work like this.

Read more at Non Stop Honolulu.

This episode begins with a child finding a severed hand while swimming in the ocean. McGarrett is informed of the case while he is eating lunch with Joe and trying to get a feel for whether or not Joe is trying to help him get to the bottom of the surveillance video featuring his father and Wo fat. Joe tells him to be patient but it appears Steve thinks that the process is taking suspiciously long.

Back at headquarters Steve and Danno meet with Max to discuss their victim. The man (Blake Spencer) was shot and then cut up by a boat propeller. When they go to his home to investigate they find out he is a salvage diver and treasure hunter. They also find some old coins in his house and when they take them to an expert they establish that they may in fact be from a historical shipwreck called the Princessa Del Mar. This leads them to what they believe is a rival salvage diver (Jesse Billings) who has made no bones about the fact that he is looking for the same ship and is taking on investors to help pay for his work. After viewing a promo video aimed at luring investors in they see that the deceased worked for Jesse Billings.

Meanwhile… Steve goes to Catherine to see if she can check with the DOD and find what is taking so long to process the video Joe gave them. Lori visits Blake’s mother to inform her of her son’s death but thinks better of it when she finds that the woman is suffering from alzheimer’s and has regressed to thinking Blake is still a child. Chino Ho finds an old wallet in the deceased’s dive bag. The lab thinks the wallet was submerged for over 50 years. This means that Blake was not salvaging the Princessa Del mar as they suspected.

When they find out that the Princessa Del Mar coins are fakes they figure out that Billings had faked their discovery to keep his investors on the hook. Blake must have discovered this deception but Billings insists that he did not know Blake was on to him and thus had no reason to kill him. The money they found in the old wallet is from the World War II era and it leads them in a new direction though. They call out the coast guard to get help locating Bake’s boat, which they assume must still be out there. They find it anchored about 40 miles off the shore of one of the islands. The boat proves to be the scene of the crime. They find blood and an expelled slug which tells them someone else was on the boat and that this person betrayed Blake.

Steve and Joe dive down to find out what Blake was salvaging and they find a WWII ambulance with an old skeleton in it. Since they believe the body is likely a military man they decide to look through old records to see if they can identify the man. Steve finds a record of a downed officer’s body being transported via boat when the ambulance carrying his coffin was lost at sea. Lori recognizes the man from a photo she saw at Blake’s mother’s home. It is her father and Blake’s grandfather. The body was lost and they were never able to properly bury him which was agonizing for the family. This dive was very important to Blake but it seems unlikely anyone would kill him over this discovery. But then Joe is able to get an ID on the body found in the front of the ambulance. The man was dishonorably discharged from the military after stealing 2 million dollars of overprint currency. He must have hid the money in the casket of Blake’s grandfather to get it off the base and THAT discovery would be motive for murder.

The team finds that the equipment rental owner that Blake used had boats in the vicinity of Blake’s dive on the day he died. When they go to his office they find the old casket that had been pulled from the ambulance and the rental owner dead inside it. Lori is able to lead them to the killer when a ring imprint is spotted on the man’s skull. She interviewed the owner of the ring, a rival diver, earlier that day. When they try to apprehend him on his boat a shoot out ensues but they manage to take him alive and arrest him. The diver killed Blake and the rental owner to get the money. Case closed.

In other news… Steve says goodbye to Catherine because she is being transferred across the world but she does tell him that the DOD never received any tape from Joe. Danny asks a new lady out on a date and Kono is covering her tracks after hacking Chin’s account. At a military funeral held for the lost officer, Steve asks Joe why he trying to keep him from the truth about his father. Joe tells him that he is not the only one afraid to find out where this rabbit hole goes. Joe isn’t keen on potentially smearing the McGarrett name just to get at the truth, which won’t bring Steve’s dad back. The episode closes with Steve disregarding this and saying he has to know.