This week’s Hawaii Five-0 felt more like a movie, with equal parts terrorist-threat level freaking out, and internal struggle and demolishment. It really did feel like the world was coming to an end. Earlier this week I listened to a radio interview with Daniel Dae Kim, who plays Chin Ho Kelly, and he talked about how accommodating the people of Oahu have been with their island. I have to say, the scene during the first ten minutes with an actual wrecking ball hitting the car seems to be a pretty generous accommodation to me. But I digress.
This episode welcomes back Joe White, the man whose name answers the question, “Why is Steve so crazy?” Yes, as his training officer, it’s Joe’s fault, and he certainly proves that during this episode. Joe returns to Hawaii as a member of private security, this week lending his services to Mitch Lange, a patient who is incubating a rare form of Bird Flu. In route transferring Lange to the hospital, their team is literally hit with a wrecking ball and systematically wiped out, all before the patient is abducted. So now they have a rare strain of bird flu somewhere on the island with more than a 90% mortality rate, and it’s being weaponized.
The good news is they realize that the equipment, type of doctor , and distribution process needed to weaponize the virus are all very specific and, therefore, easier to track. Bad news is if they already had all of that set in place before Lange was abducted, they have at most 12 hours before the island becomes infected. Once the team tracks the doctor, who was also abducted and forced to cooperate as they took his wife prisoner, Grover shows off his skills by connecting the terrorists together through a ex-CIA operative. Even while the team is figuring out that the terrorists’ distribution process is bees, we get probably the creepiest scene of the episode. In what I consider to be more appropriate for a movie like Contagion: the infected bees are used in a test trial to kill a man.
So the team tracks the terrorists, taking them out before two escape with the van of bees. While Joe manages to disarm the men in the van, he’s too late to keep the bees from getting loose in it. So, of course, he chooses to crash the van into the harbor with him in it. As Grover realizes, Steve wasn’t born that crazy; Joe taught him how to be that way. Danny gives a look to Steve that basically says, “Now you know what I have to deal with working with you.” So the bees die, the infection is stopped, Lange is saved, and Joe is quarantined until it can be assured he is not incubating the virus.
In between the events of the case, Joe and Steve finally get the opportunity to talk after months apart. Steve is clearly still upset about Joe’s secrets and lies with regards to Wo Fat and Steve’s mother, Doris. Joe admits to knowing about Doris raising Wo Fat as a child after accidentally killing his mother, while Steve admits that Wo Fat already told him before Steve killed him. Steve’s next order of business is tracking down his mother, no matter what. After all this, it looks as if Steve and Joe are still solid. Alas, that is not the case, because with the help of Danny, Steve has put Joe under surveillance. He confirms to Danny that he no longer trusts Joe, and we see that the lies Steve has been told were too much to forgive.
Do you think Steve and Joe will ever recover what they had? And where in the world is Doris McGarrett? She has a lot to answer for.
[Photo via CBS]
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