By Stu Robinson,

Like last year’s season finale, this year’s season-ending episode of CBS’ Hawaii Five-0 began with the death of a secondary character. But the resemblance ended there. Whereas the Season 1 finale put the unit in peril in pursuit of the year’s main plot line – unraveling the conspiracy behind the deaths of McGarrett’s parents – the Season 2 cliffhangers involved each team member’s individual backstories. Only McGarrett remained hung up on the Season 1 story line.

The episode begins with somebody snapping surveillance of the series regulars, before Honolulu Police Capt. Vince Fryer (Tom Sizemore) is dispatched to an alley on a report of a dead body. He arrives to find himself alone but for a figure sprawled face down a third of the way down the alley. He radios dispatch, asking where is backup is, but is told there is no record of the original call he received. Pulling his gun, he approaches the prone figure and flips it over. It’s a mannequin with the word “goodbye” on a sign taped to its chest.

Fryer reacts to a sound in the alley but is shot in the back before he can turn. A hooded figure approaches the fallen cop to finish him off, but he’s not dead yet. He rolls over and puts a bullet into his attacker before succumbing to two more bullets himself. (Bummer. Fryer was growing on me, and it was nice to see Sizemore getting some steady work. Alas, he’s unlikely to rise from the dead as he seemingly did in this year’s indie horror film Slumber Party Slaughter.)

When the call comes in to Five-0, McGarrett is verbally jousting with Joe White (Terry O’Quinn) about Steve’s recent trip to Japan, on which he tracked the elusive Shelbourne and arrested Wo Fat. Joe admits he lied before, but says he’s ready to take McGarrett to Shelbourne.

The Five-0 team converges in the alley, where coroner Max Bergman (Masi Oka) is waiting with the body. From the shell casings and Fryer’s bullet wounds, they quickly deduce much of what happened. Max steps away and starts to follow a trail of blood down the alley. As he passes a dumpster, he turns and starts yelling something, only to be shot from behind the trash bin.

The hooded figure appears from behind the dumpster, flees through a warehouse and jumps into one the HPD patrol cars idling at the scene. A high-speed chase ensues.

• During the pursuit, McGarrett says to Danno: “Why would somebody shoot Fryer and then wait for other cops to show up?”
• Danno: “Maybe he’s looking to check out; maybe he’s a complete idiot. I have no idea. The bigger question is: ‘Why is he headed straight for the HPD?'”
• McGarrett: “Seriously?”

The answer becomes obvious when they enter the parking garage, where every HPD cruiser looks like the one they were chasing.

“Perfect,” Danno says. “I’m pretty sure it’s the white one.”

The pursuit continues on foot through the police station, but the hooded figure eludes capture. Cut to the inside of an ambulance where Max whispers to White that the shooter was a brown-haired woman. McGarrett receives the news from White via cell phone and remembers a woman matching the description with whom he’d spoken minutes earlier. Down the hallway from where that encounter took place, Kono finds the hoodie in a trash can. Moving further in that direction, the team members find a severed gas line – forcing them to abandon the search in order to clear the building. They get out seconds before the building explodes.

By now Max is in the hospital, White still at his side, when Kamekona (Taylor Wily) enters the room with balloons and boxes of shrimp – tofu for Max and spicy for Joe. “Tofu shrimp for our fallen hero,” he says. While they eat, Max tells Joe how he was following the assailant’s blood trail when he was shot. Realizing that is the first mention of the shooter being wounded, Joe phones McGarrett with the update.

Chin Ho makes a separate trip to the hospital. He’s giving an orderly the “just a scratch. Let me leave” act when his wife, Dr. Malia Waincroft (Reiko Aylesworth), turns up and tells him he’s going nowhere fast. Still, seems like an odd moment for the writers to bring her back. Hmmm …

Back at the office, McGarrett and the team map out places where the shooter could get a wound sewn up. Dismissing the hospitals and clinics as too obvious, they hone in on a veterinary hospital six blocks from HPD. Sure enough, the shooter has broken in, killed the receptionist and forced the vet to stitch up her wound. She then kills the vet, but by then the Five-0 team members are approaching the building. She pulls out a rifle, which looks way too bulky and heavy for her to have been carrying throughout the earlier pursuit, and takes a few shots at the cops out front. Return fire forces her away from the window, and the pursuers enter through the waiting room and find the dead receptionist.

When they move toward the back office, the assassin releases a large dog to throw them off and fires off several pistol shots, hitting McGarrett in his body armor. That, of course, just pisses him off. He creates his own diversion by rolling the receptionist’s chair into the rear office; when the hit woman emerges to shoot, McGarrett dives in from the side and shoots her dead. Danno appears annoyed that their most likely source of information has been eliminated, but McGarrett says he did it for Fryer. Still, even he seems to realize that killing her wasn’t the smartest move.

At this point, about 50 minutes in, the episode stops for a breath before setting up each character’s cliffhangers.

Guest stars

The hot-chick assassin is played by actress Taylor Cole, who played Jesse McCartney’s hot surfing instructor on Summerland and the hot neighbor on Comedy Central’s short-lived My Secret Girlfriend. But this time out, the hot actress plays such a stone-cold killer that I didn’t even recognize her at first. According to IMDB, Cole also appeared in several episodes of Heroes’ third season. I don’t remember her from that and don’t know if she shared screen time with Oka, who starred in Heroes. But this is the second case of a Heroes actor guest starring on H50; Greg Grunberg played a Customs agent in Season 2, Episode 8.

Cole’s assassin character, Hillary Chaver, had an accomplice – the guy who’d been taking surveillance photos earlier in the episode. He refused to come to her rescue when she was cornered in the animal hospital. Turns out, they’d been accomplices in a string of bank robberies investigated by Fryer and Frank Delano (William Baldwin), a crooked cop who was taken down by Fryer and Kono earlier this season. They were thought to have been killed back then when their getaway car crashed and burned, a fact attested to by Delano when he is questioned in prison.

Cliffhangers

The last 10 minutes of the season finale bring a cliffhanger for each team member.

Danno‘s is by far the lamest. Early in the episode, the first McGarrett-Danno cargument since Alex O’Loughlin’s return from drug treatment involves Danno’s reluctance to take a private phone call while Steve is in the car with him. In explaining the call, Danno, who moved to Hawaii only because his ex-wife brought their daughter, Grace, there, reveals that the ex now wants to move with the daughter to Las Vegas for her new husband’s job.

This is just dumb. Suddenly, the ex, Rachel, is back to being an uncaring shrew at the other end of a phone call, with Danno sputtering and exploring his legal options. This after the writers spent a year and a half humanizing Rachel and reheating her relationship with Danno, to the point that she believed Danno had impregnated her. She even planned to leave “the Stan” and return to New Jersey with Grace and Danno. Then, suddenly, the baby wasn’t Danno’s; it was Stan’s, and for that reason she was going to try and make the second marriage work. So now we’re supposed to believe Rachel is so insensitive that she’s going to rip Grace away from Danno a second time? The cliffhanger, such as it is, comes when Danno decides to reopen the court case for custody of Grace.

And what about Danno’s other love interest: museum curator Gabrielle Asano (Autumn Reeser)? It was a big deal when Danno introduced her to Grace in Season 2, Episode 17. But we haven’t seen her since.

Chin Ho is back at the state prison, using his position with Five-0 to spring Delano. We then see them arrive at a harbor. “I did everything you asked,” Chin Ho says. “I got you out. You said on the phone that if I did it, you’d let my cousin go.”

Huh? Say what?

Delano opens up a laptop computer with a split screen showing Malia and Kono gagged in different locations.

• Chin Ho: “Why? Why are you doing this to me.”
• Delano: “Because you got away with it.”
• Chin Ho: “Got away with what? What are you talking about?!?”
• Delano: “Everybody knows you’re a dirty cop, Chin. But instead of having your life ruined like the rest of us, you got your badge back.”
• Chin Ho: “Hey, I didn’t take any of that damn drug money.”
• Delano: “No, but you knew who did. And you didn’t say a word.”

He tells Chin Ho that there is time to rescue either Malia or Kono, but the other will die.

• Chin Ho protests: “You got what you wanted. You’re out of jail. You got your revenge. Fryer is dead.”
• Delano: “Your cousin set me up and then sent me to prison.”

Delano tells Chin Ho that he can find Kono on a boat two miles offshore, while Malia is at home waiting for him. Chin Ho jumps behind the wheel and races home, where he finds Malia sprawled on the floor, bleeding but alive.

The last we see of Kono, she is being dumped into the ocean. She’s alive, but bound and gagged. It’s hard to see how she escapes this one, since Chin Ho has made his Sophie’s choice to rescue Malia. She’s still with her yakuza boyfriend, Adam, but it’s hard figure how even the island’s de facto top gangster could mobilize forces to rescue her in time. And yet … there haven’t been any reports of Grace Park leaving the show. And, if Kono were to die, who would bring the estrogen to the team? I suppose they could bring back Lauren German’s Lori Weston. Yet that could be awkward: Before departing, Lori admitted her feelings for McGarrett. And it’s been reported that McGarrett’s girlfriend, Navy Lt. Catherine Rollins (Michelle Borth), will be a regular character next season. So that would be a nasty love triangle.

McGarrett‘s cliffhanger is learning the identity of the mysterious Shelbourne. Joe takes him to the stoop of a house in Japan. “You want answers? They’re all in there,” Joe says, then he departs. McGarrett knocks on the door and looks back over his shoulder to see that Joe is gone. The door opens. McGarrett looks in, freezes for a moment, then utters one word: “Mom?”

Didn’t see that coming.

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