By Stu Robinson,

I’ve observed that episodes of CBS’s new Hawaii Five-O come in two varieties: those devoted to revealing the back stories of Steve McGarrett (Alex O’Loughlin) and the three other main characters; and those that simply serve up a crime for them to solve. Episodes 13 & 14 are prime examples of each.

Episode 13 delves deeply into the mysterious murders of Steve’s parents and reintroduces his younger sister, Mary Ann (Taryn Manning) – missing since Episode 5. I’ve spent a lot of time joking about Mary Ann – how she appeared out of nowhere in Episode 4 and then vanished with no explanation after the following episode.

We don’t know where she’s been all this time, but – as I revealed in an earlier blog post – she was, in fact, kidnapped at some point. This dawns on Steve after three ninja-like prowlers break into the McGarrett home overnight but take only the mysterious toolbox containing clues about what Papa McGarrett was investigating at the time of his death. Other than the Five-O team, the only person who knew about the toolbox was Mary Ann, who discovered it and photographed the contents in one of her earlier episodes. Sure enough, calls to her phone go unanswered and a search of her rental home turns up not Mary Ann but signs of a struggle.

Now, I’ve mentioned several times this season that Hawaii Five-O often asks viewers to suspend disbelief in order to move the plot along. But this time we’re expected to believe Mary Ann’s kidnappers are THE STUPIDEST CRIMINALS EVER.

Why? Because they never confiscate her iPhone. [Product placement!] So when she wakes up in a car trunk, she simply speed dials her bro, head of the governor’s anti-crime task force. Steve tells her to kick out one of the tail lights, which enables her to describe where she is and makes the car easy to identify. Using a helicopter made available in minutes by a tour company, Steve and Danno locate the damaged car (not a Chevy) and swoop in to rescue Mary Ann.

Because two kidnappers are killed in the rescue, the Five-O team has no clue how to proceed – except for the evidence photos on Mary Ann’s iPhone, which her kidnappers never took away.

The trail of evidences leads to the head of the local Japanese mafia, or yakuza. He is a powerful businessman with ties to the governor, and his brother is a former Honolulu cop who the team believes planted the car bomb that killed the McGarretts’ mother. Eventually, the businessman’s fingerprints are found on the stolen toolbox, which Kono recovers. Of course, he wouldn’t have needed to handle, or even steal, the toolbox if his goons had confiscated the iPhone with the photos.

The yakuza boss is arrested while playing golf with his brother and the mysterious Wo Fat, who first appeared and the end of the previous episode. The brother turns up dead shortly thereafter, killed coincidentally in the same manner as Mama McGarrett. With him dead and Victor Hesse in jail, it would appear that the killers of both parents have met justice. But Episode 13 makes it clear that additional evidence from the toolbox relates to more recent investigations by the McGarretts’ father, so viewers can expect more to come with this back story.

At the end of Episode 13, Steve puts Mary Ann on a Hawaiian Airlines (Product placement!) flight to Los Angeles in order to get her away from whatever danger remains on the islands. Of course, she notes the resemblance to the scene years earlier when their father put her and Steve on separate planes for the same reason.

And Now, Something Completely Different

Episode 14 is a straight-up whodunit that begins when Kono and Chin Ho assist the Honolulu Police in a high-speed pursuit. Kono’s Chevy Cruze (Product placement!) blows past a police car and closes on the fleeing Ford Mustang before the latter flips over, killing the drive and ejecting a box containing a severed head.

It is a fast-moving episode, but views do get the opportunity to figure things out on their own. I got it a half step before the Five-O team.

The plot doesn’t get into the main characters’ back stories – with two brief exceptions:

• During their requisite bickering, Danno brings up McGarrett’s daddy issues, asking, “Why is it that every time somebody’s father is involved, you get all goofy? … You lose all objectivity. It’s called ‘transference.'”
• Chin Ho and Kono encounter Chin Ho’s ex-fiancée. In an earlier episode, Kono made reference to the fiancée deserting Chin Ho when he needed her most,but in this episode the fiancée reminds Chin Ho that it was he who told her to go. Since this character wasn’t the least bit integral to the plot, the viewer must assume that a future episode will take up this subplot.

At the end, McGarrett passes on a golden opportunity to drop a “Book ‘er, Danno.”

As guest stars, Episode 14 included an aging Greg Germann (Ally McBeal) and Jordan Belfi, who played a recurring charcter on O’Loughlin’s first U.S. television series, 2007’s Moonlight. Unfortunately for Belfi, both characters he played end up dead.

On the lighter side, a recurring gag refers back to the the cop series CHiPS, which ran from 1977 to 1983 on NBC. After noting some motorcycle cops at the accident scene, McGarrett remarks how cool that job would be. Danno, being Danno, responds that the mortality rate for motorcycle cops if five times that of regular police.

“It’s a TV cop fantasy,” McGarrett protests. “Why you gotta ruin it with statistics!”

The two go on to argue about which of them most closely resembled the CHiPS character “Ponch” (played by Erik Estrada). This goes on until Kono interrupts them watching a CHiPS marathon at the office and remarks that the other main character, Jon (played by Larry Wilcox) is “hot.”

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