By Stu Robinson,

Season 2, Episode 11 of CBS’ new Hawaii Five-0 draws heavily from a real-life 1976 school bus kidnapping in Chowchilla, Calif., in which the hostages were placed underground in the back of a buried truck. 

The real-life hostages eventually managed to climb out and get help. In the TV version, it’s Five-0 to the rescue. The episode is what I’ve called a “pursuit” episode – and it’s a roller-coaster ride as McGarrett and crew tie the crime to a recent cocaine bust and race to find the hostages before the drug gang kills them.

The brief secondary plot involves McGarrett’s mentor, Joe White. Forced into retirement by the Navy after the North Korea caper in Episode 10, White turns his focus to Wo Fat and the mysterious Shelburne. He starts by kidnapping a yakuza boss on parole after being arrested by McGarrett in Season 1, Episode 13. Later, he brings the criminal to McGarrett and says he’s learned that Shelburne is a person, and Wo Fat is very close to finding him. From the trunk of Joe’s car, where he is tied up, the yakuza boss says Shelburne is “someone Wo Fat fears, and Wo Fat fears no one. For that reason, he won’t rest until Shelburne is dead.”

Joe drives off, telling McGarrett that he’s going to find Shelburne. This is where the plot thickens: In the final scene, Joe uses his mobile phone while driving to call somebody and says, “Steve is getting too close. We’re going to have to move you.”

Notes

We finally got a “Book ’em Danno” – the first of the season, I think.

The website TV Rockstars reports that McGarrett’s sister, Mary Ann (Taryn Manning) and girlfriend, Lt. Catherine Rollins (Michelle Borth), will return this season. McGarrett put his sister on a flight to Los Angeles at the end of Season 1, Episode 13 in order to get her away from whatever danger remains for them on the islands. The Navy shipped Catherine off to the Persian Gulf at the end of Season 2, Episode 4, when Borth’s own show, ABC’s Combat Hospital, still had a chance of being renewed. It wasn’t, and that is good for Hawaii Five-0. Who can forget the repartee when Catherine and Mary Ann bumped into each other – literally – in the McGarrett kitchen in Season 1, Episode 5:

• Mary Ann: “Big night last night.”
• Catherine: “Hmm?”
• Mary Ann: “Old house; thin walls.”
• Catherine: “Oh God!”
• Mary Ann: “Yeah, you said that a lot.”

CBS has announced that Ed Asner (Mary Tyler Moore, Lou Grant) will guest star in an episode this spring. According to the network, “Asner will reprise his role of August March, a character he played in an episode of the original Hawaii Five-0 in 1975, called ‘Wooden Model of a Rat.’ In a first for the modern series, footage from the 1975 episode featuring Asner and his character’s backstory will be used, showing him as an up-and-coming world class smuggler. Now a reformed man after serving 30 years in prison for murder, March lives on Oahu and is approached by the Five-0 to assist on a smuggling case.”

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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.