By Stu Robinson,

CBS teased Season 2, Episode 16 of Hawaii Five-0 by implying the team would lose a member.

Well, you don’t need to be Einstein to notice which actor’s name isn’t in the opening credits. Goodbye Lauren German.

German’s character, Lori Westin, was the big surprise at the beginning of Season 2. The new governor, concerned about some of McGarrett’s tactics, assigned her to Five-0 by to be his eyes and ears. The writers planted her there as a potential new love interest for McGarrett.

Any doubt about Lori’s fate was sealed early in the episode when McGarrett showed up at the governor’s charity gala with his

Season 1 love interest, Navy Lt. Catherine Rollins (Michelle Borth) on his arm. The whole team is at the formal affair, and I’ve got to say: These folks clean up nicely, especially Lori and Kono. Nicknamed “Sweet” and “Spicy” by Sang Min in Episode 14, Lori rocked a strapless dark red dress while Kono shimmered in a white gown with silver sequins.

Time travel.

I’ve griped in previous blog updates that flashbacks have become an overused plot device. I’ll give this episode a pass, though, for the creative way the writers bounced the scenes back and forth from present to past throughout the episode. In any procedural, there are two phases: investigation and resolution. This episode made those phases concurrent, bouncing back and forth between them, challenging views to figure out how they would converge.

The narrative begins in the present, with Gov. Sam Denning (Richard T. Jones) yelling at a bloody Lori Weston in a hospital emergency room. As we see an unidentified patient receive treatment in the background, Denning tells Lori: “When this is over, you’re going to have to make a choice, to save Hawaii or Five-0.”

[Cue the boffo theme song.]

And we’re at the charity gala, 18 hours earlier, with McGarret and Danno trying to one-up each other in a silent auction for University of Hawaii football season tickets. This becomes a running gag during the episode, and a running promotion for the Warrior football program. (Season 2, Episode 5 centered on the UH women’s volleyball program.)

The reverie is cut short as the team is summoned to a back room at the gala hotel, where a dead woman has ended up after being dropped down a laundry chute. McGarrett starts going into full tactical mode but is stopped by the governor, who wants the investigation to be low-key so it won’t disrupt the party. “I want regular updates on this,” the governor says, turning his gaze from McGarrett to Lori. “Every step of the way. You understand?”

As the story unfolds, the dead woman turns out to have been seeking revenge on a man who raped her sister a year earlier. Well, we see how that worked out for her. By the time Five-0 figures this out, the suspected murderer/rapist has taken refuge in the Russian consulate. Embassies and consulates, of course, are considered territories of the countries they represent – off limits to local law enforcement. At this point, the team doesn’t just cross the line, it pole vaults over the threshold by faking a terrorist attack to breach the diplomatic compound and flush out the suspect. And when McGarrett and the suspect are hit by a car in the aftermath, Kono infiltrates an operating room to retrieve a sample of the suspect’s blood.

Even before the writers shipped Catherine off to the Persian Gulf at the end of Season 2, Episode 4, McGarrett and Lori were exchanging smoldering glances. After she departed, this escalated to lingering hugs and obvious concern when the other was imperiled. By the previous episode, they were working out together, with McGarrett carrying Lori back to civilization after she injures herself on a mountain run.

And I’m not the only one who noticed. Back in Episode 4, Danno told McGarrett: “Listen. She follows orders. She likes sports. If she was into blowing stuff up, romantic getaways at the DMZ, I’d say we are looking at a love connection.”

In the same episode, a lengthy stakeout prompted this awkward exchange between Lori and Chin Ho.
Lori (pacing): “Sorry, uh … patience isn’t my strong suit.”
Chin Ho: “You’re a lot like Steve, you know that?”

All this leads back to the emergency room in Episode 16. Looking back at the the chaos the investigation has caused, a beat-up McGarrett tells Lori: “‘The utmost discretion.’ The governor is going to love this.”

“Don’t worry about that,” she replies. “I’ll take care of the governor.” She clearly is more worried about Steve than the governor.

Once matters are resolved, Lori shows up in McGarrett’s office with two envelopes. She gives him the first one, which contains the UH football season tickets, for which she outbid McGarrett and Danno. And viewers don’t have to take her word for it. The camera zooms in on the tickets in McGarrett’s hand, showing clearly that the top one is for the Warriors’ actual Dec. 1, 2012, home game against South Alabama. Touchdown for product placement!

The second envelope, Lori tells McGarrett, is her resignation from Five-0. “He gave me a choice,” she says of the governor. “He asked me whose side I was on – the state of Hawaii’s or Five-0’s. I said ‘both.’ He said, ‘Wrong answer.'”

McGarrett tries to protest, but she cuts him off – reminding him why the governor put her with Five-0 in the first place.

“He said there’d be repercussions if we crossed the line – which we did repeatedly.” After a pregnant pause, she comes clean, sort of: “I let things slide because, uh, because of my feelings for you … and the rest of the team, of course. But, yeah, I let a lot of things slide.”

She tells McGarrett she’s moving back East. Her friends and family are there.

“Is that what we’re doing?” McGarrett counters. “Saying goodbye.”
“Yeah,” she replies. “I guess it’s goodbye.”
McGarrett: “I’m going to miss you.”
[Scene ends with awkward hug.]

[Fade to Catherine, back in military fatigues, packing for her return to her aircraft carrier.]

There is a knock on the door, and McGarrett enters carrying a duffel bag and wearing military fatigues himself.

“I felt bad that our weekend got blown up by a case,” he tells her, “and I figured since I was due for my Reserve drill, I’d put in a request to, um, to do it on the Enterprise.”

Episode 15

I guess I must acknowledge Hawaii Five-0‘s lackluster previous episode.

A U.S. marshal is killed in the bathroom on a Hawaiian Airlines flight to Honolulu. His prisoner and another passenger are missing. Surveillance video shows them escaping through the plane’s cargo hold. Turns out that Danno knew the marshal, who was killed because he recognized the missing passenger. It was Danno’s old partner, a dirty cop who went to prison based upon Danno’s testimony. Going to prison cost him his family, and now he wants Danno to feel what that is like. The man has stalked Danno’s ex-wife, Rachel (Claire van der Boom); their daughter, Grace (Teilor Grubbs); and Rachel’s new husband, The Stan (Mark Deklin). He’s studied their routines, tapped their phones. He kidnaps Grace and orders Danno to kill Stan on the theory that Rachel will never forgive him. The plot is convoluted – and resolved far too easily. Pretty much a waste of an hour.

Worth noting, though, are that:

• Mark Dunkerley, CEO of Hawaiian Airlines, makes a cameo appearance to promise Five-0 the airline’s full cooperation.
• Kono again turns to legendary lab tech Charlie Fong (Brian Yang) to find a key piece of evidence. C’mon girl! Ask him out already.

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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.