By Stu Robinson,

Season 2, Episode 20 of CBS’ Hawaii Five-0 was the first to reflect the absence of star Alex O’Loughlin, who took a leave from the show last month to undergo treatment for an addiction to pain killers.

Early on, Danno (Scott Caan) finds a letter on his desk from McGarrett (O’Loughlin) informing him that the Five-0 commander has gone to look for Joe White (Terry O’Quinn) because McGarrett believes White lied to him about being the mysterious Shelbourne in Season 2, Episode 14. In the meantime, it’s up to Danno to hold down the fort at Five-0 headquarters.

 

It’s a cliche to say that you don’t know what you have until it’s gone, but I found it to be true with this episode. It just seemed to lack some gravitas without McGarrett. On top of that, I found Danno less likable as as the guy in charge. There was no place for his usual comic irony, as he had to keep charging ahead to keep the plot moving. Attempts at witty repartee fell to Chin Ho (Daniel Dae Kim) and weren’t worth me quoting.

The episode begins with a reminder not to judge a book by its cover. A young woman with a flat tire on a dark stretch of road rebuffs a rough-looking good samaritan and is relieved to see another vehicle, a small pick-up truck, pull up to the scene. She rushes to the door of the pick-up hoping to find a rescuer, but instead she is grabbed and brutally pulled through the driver’s window into the cab. [Cut to the boffo Hawaii Five-0 theme song.]

When the woman’s body is found by the side of a road, coroner Max Bergman (Masi Oka) recognizes the signs of a serial killer, known as “The Trash Man,” thought to be imprisoned. Max seems to know a lot about this killer and implies that the guy in prison is innocent.

So, what is the “shocking information” about Max that the previews have teased? Turns out Max was adopted by the Bergmans and, as an adult, found out that his birth mother was one of The Trash Man’s victims. He studied the case, went to visit the man imprisoned and concluded that the real killer remained free. The suspense comes in learning how the slayings are tied together and watching Max in a life-or-death confrontation with the killer. To survive, Max goes all McGarrett/MacGyver: Tied to a chair, he tips himself over to grab a shard of broken glass, which he uses to free his hands and, ultimately, stab the serial killer to death.

Notes

• At the end of the episode, McGarrett is shown (supposedly in Tokyo) declining a call on his cell phone from Danno. Really, though, the footage could have been from about any episode in the last two years.
• The episode had a fairly dumb secondary plot driven by Kamekona (Taylor Wily), who demands that Five-0 find his missing shrimp truck. Danno believes the job is beneath them, and sloughs it off on Chino Ho and Kono. In the end, Kono finds that the city impounded the truck because Kamekona forgot to renew his vending license.
• Kono (Grace Park) has a very brief scene with lab technician Charlie Fong (Brian Yang) at the Honolulu Police garage, but there is no hint at potential romance between the two.

###

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