S2E8: Tonight’s episode of Hawaii Five-0 kicks off like a Michael Bay movie, with a pilotless plane speeding towards the ocean. Unfortunately, also like a Michael Bay movie, there’s no discernable climax.
While there was no one flying the aforementioned plane, there was one passenger: Monica Jenssen, who we soon learn was an ICE (immigration and customs enforcement) agent. We also soon learn that Jennsen was dead well before the plane crashed.
The Five-0’s first move, per the instructions of Jennsen’s supervisor, Jeff Morrison (guest star Greg Grunberg), is to find her “red book” — aka professional diary. When officers make their way into Jennsen’s home, they find her red book, sans a few pages, along with signs of forced entry and her dog, which soon becomes Danno’s!
They also discover that Jennsen was tracking Liam Miller (gues star Jon Gries), who on initial questioning McGarrett and Co. dismisses as a medical-marijuana-smoking cancer sufferer. They focus in instead on Jason Akida, whose fingerprints are found on the missing pages from Jennsen’s red book.
Akida claims to have merely been a “courier” but on further prodding cops to being an informant to Jennsen and breaking into her home after her death to wipe her red book of his name and thus involvement in her narcotics investigation. Akida is shady but ruled out as Jennsen’s murderer.
That’s when all attention turns back toward Miller, a guy capable of flying planes and a guy, it turns out, seeking revenge on a low-level black-market supplement provider based in Oahu’s Chinatown named Dr. James Yang, who’d dubiously promised Miller his cancer would be cured if he took Yang’s shark cartilage. Agent Jennsen found herself wrapped up in Miller’s vengeance, to her ultimate demise. Again, pretty anticlimactic stuff tonight.
TOP FIVE MOMENTS FROM TONIGHT’S EPISODE
1. The aforementioned, Michael Bay-esque opening sequence, featuring a plane on a collision course with the ocean. The crash non-landing is rather underwhelming, but the tension leading up to it made for a nice intro.
2. Kono goes into a smoke shop called Pipe Dreams to score pot (without a prescription), posing as a seductive stoner. As soon as the transaction goes through, she loses her drawl and promptly arrests the store clerk.
3. Fresh off a commercial break, we find the Five-0 squad chasing Jason Akida through the city streets. It ends abruptly, when McGarrett blindsides Akida and tackles him into a bunch of fruit boxes.
4. Five-0 goes goes looking for a drug “stash pad,” guns and movement-sensing devices in hand, only to find a bunch of peaceful-looking ladies making floral arrangements. Granted, they find a more ominous scene behind door No. 2, but a few funny moments initially interrupt the build-up and make us chuckle. Or at least me.
5. Apropos of nothing, really, “Bad to the Bone” starts playing, and Max rolls up in his new taxi-yellow Camaro (vanity plate: “Warp 9”), which he bought only after selling his “entire prehistoric-fossil collection.” Probably one of the funnier moments from season 2.
