S2E4: Tonight’s episode of Hawaii Five-0 was all over the map, figuratively speaking — as past issues return to the surface, albeit briefly, new ones are hinted at, and the team is forced to solve a doozy of a murder mystery that leads them in several different directions.
An unidentified hand turns up in the water, and Max soon IDs the apparent murder victim to whom it belonged: mercurial “salvage” diver Blake Spencer. Naturally, McGarrett and Co. still don’t know what his backstory is, and they don’t truly find out until the end of the episode.
After finding a set of what appear to be rare coins in Spencer’s apartment that Five-0 thinks the diver found near a shipwreck, the first suspect becomes an opportunistic business owner who hired Spencer for a treasure-hunting job, with which the coins appear to have been associated. But the man, Jesse Billings, admits to only petty wrongdoings, and it is soon learned that the coins are, in fact, fake.
It leads to a series of more or less dead-end interrogations and tying up loose ends for McGarrett, Danno, Lori and Joe — that is, until they’re able to track down the boat on which Spencer was shot and killed and venture deep underwater to see what he was searching for.
It’s not immediately clear — even to us viewers — but a skeleton that the gang finds near the water’s floor is locked inside an ambulance that dates all the way back to World War II, and that’s when everything begins to unravel: Spencer wasn’t exactly trying to find buried treasure, at least not the kind with great monetary value, but rather the remains of his grandfather, a WWII veteran; two other men, however, thought he was cheating them out $2 million in antiquated Hawaiian bills that was part of the whole operation, and they killed him for it.
Much, much more intriguing during tonight’s episode, though, were two callbacks: the Kono situation and the mystery surrounding McGarrett’s late father.
Steve continues to obsess over the details of his dad’s involvement with Wo Fat. Early on, he asks Joe to follow up with the Department of Defense and request a formal investigation, but at the end of the episode, we learn that Joe didn’t follow through and that there is much more for Steve to consider before continuing on down that road (i.e. his name and his family’s name). Kono, meanwhile, is still under not-so-distant surveillance by Chin — but now she’s becoming more combative, and after Chin finds out that she has crossed the line and hacked into Hawaii Police Department’s computers to aid Frank (Billy Baldwin), it becomes clear that this is a situation that could really hurt Five-0 down the road and obviously become a major story line.
TOP FIVE MOMENTS FROM TONIGHT’S EPISODE
1. The opening sequence, in which a young girl in Waikiki Beach is startled by her little brother, who’s swimming in a shark-fin hat. He goes off to claim his next victim, only to find a severed hand (ultimately belonging to the aforementioned Blake Spencer) floating with no owner of said appendage in sight.
2. The following quote from Danno (to McGarrett) regarding a whale on display at Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum in O’ahu: “It’s amazing. I mean, one day you are the king of the ocean, right? Next thing you know, you are hanging from the ceiling of a museum, and little children are looking at your private parts.”
3. The following quote, from Max, looking like a kid in a candy store: “Did you know that JPAC [Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam] is the largest forensics lab in the world? And that it specializes exclusively in postmortem identification? Which incidentally is my favorite type of identification.” To which Joe replies: “You need a paper bag or something?”
4. When Max is taking photo at the crime scene, he snaps a close-up and finds an indentation of a ring on Julian’s head — at which point Lori realizes (as do we) that the killer appeared on the show up to that point for no more than a cameo. Cue the “Dun-dun-dun!” music.
5. The climactic shootout between McGarrett/Lori and Jimmy Coler, which sees McGarrett seamlessly leap onto a boat from the dock — a 50-foot drop he makes look easy.
