Hawaii Five-O Oddities, Goofs, Trivia -- Season 12

Copyright ©1994-2012 by Mike Quigley. No reproduction of any kind without permission. Original air dates are taken from information supplied by the Iolani Palace Irregulars and Karen Rhodes' Booking Five-O.

260. A Lion In The Streets

SEASON 12!

The last Five-O show of any real quality, directed by Reza Badiyi. This two-hour episode focuses on Hawaiian nationalism and the efforts of Andy Kamoku (Paul H. Smith), a descendant of Hawaiian royalty, to keep the United Resort Workers from being taken over by Johnny Mio (Harry Guardino), a mainland thug connected with Hawaiian mob boss Anthony Joseph ("Tony") Alika (Ross Martin). This show introduces William Smith as James (later "Kimo") Carew, who is trailing Mio from the mainland, since Mio has connections to the man who murdered former Boston cop Carew's wife and child. It also introduces Moe Keale as Truck, a cop from HPD who goes undercover in the union for Five-O. I wonder why he does this, since Truck jokes that he's well-known to restaurant owners. Both these actors have horrible pictures in the main credits -- their faces seem distorted. Kamoku gives McGarrett a lot of static about the unfairness of "haole law". McGarrett replies, "Don't think for one moment that anyone's race or color makes any difference to me, my friend.... No one wants to see your union stay yours more than I do." There is plenty of sparring between McGarrett and Smith, who turns in an excellent performance. Carew tells McGarrett, "You're really a hell of a detective, McGarrett," and McGarrett replies, "And you have a big mouth and bad judgement, Mr. Carew." McGarrett later tells Carew, "I don't especially like you." Fed up with what he sees as McGarrett's ineffective attempts to enforce the law, Kamoku gets a kahuna (witch doctor) to make McGarrett kapu (cursed), which means that no one like Duke, Truck or even Tony Alika can talk to McGarrett. When Duke explains the kapu to McGarrett, he says "This is the hardest thing I've ever had to do." McGarrett is shocked, saying "This is the twentieth century!" (Duke is revealed to be a college graduate with two degrees.) The Governor calls the kapu "something out of the dark ages." Kamoku and his union goons go on a vigilante rampage. There is a great scene where the beefy Carew intimidates Alika on the beach after punching out Billy Swan (Jerry Boyd), Alika's bodyguard. The ending, where the infuriated Kamoku arrives at Alika's waterfront house and puts three thugs out of action in a phony fight (don't they have guns?) is a bit much, as is McGarrett's final pleading speech (though this is not as corny as the scene where McGarrett quotes Shakespeare to Kamoku). As the episode ends, there are hints that Carew will join the Five-O team. McGarrett says "I'm not asking you to marry me, for God's sake." The score by Morton Stevens is excellent.

MORE TRIVIA:

• There are a few gorgeous shots of Hawaiian sunsets during the show.
• In the opening credits, the Waikiki movie theatre's marquee features "Valley of the Dolls" -- a movie from 1967 (probably a stock shot).
• A precursor to the fax machine with the phone plugged into a modem-like device is seen in the Five-O office.
• When Alika is talking to Mio in one scene he uses the expression "Ain't no big t'ing, bruddah."

261. Who Says Cops Don't Cry
Original air date: 10/11/79 -- Opening Credits -- End Credits

In this show, directed by Jack Lord, Sharon Farrell delivers an emotional performance as policewoman Lori Wilson, the widow of a cop who was going to join the Five-O team, seeking vengeance on the gang who gunned her husband down during a cheque-cashing-booth robbery at the Windjammer Market. McGarrett is out of town for about half of the episode, testifying before a federal grand jury in San Francisco. When he phones home, the credit card number is 1773881184A. Plot logic is stretched a bit when Lori uses the designer blouse of a woman gang member killed during the holdup to link to a fashion show at the restaurant owned by Ben Dawson (Alan Fudge), whose brother Lloyd (Darrell Fetty) is the boss of the gang that pulled off the heist. The bad guys tail Lori -- who drives a red Mustang, license number 1A-633 -- in a much more subtle way than Five-O usually does. When she arrives home, Lori peels off her skirt (seen from her shapely legs down), but keeps her high heels on, walking into another room. The way Lori figures out the location of the next robbery after she finds a bag in the trash at Lloyd's house is far-fetched. At the show's finale, both Kimo (William Smith) and Lori join Five-O. Truck isn't in the show, though McGarrett talks to him on the phone. The episode is directed by Jack Lord -- as was the last one starring Farrell, "Why Won't Linda Die? -- with an excellent score by Morton Stevens that occasionally hearkens back to "The Bells Toll at Noon." The "bookem" by McGarrett is said to Duke who arrests Lloyd Dawson after he convinces Lori not to blow him away at the end of the show. This is by far Sharon Farrell's best performance of the twelfth season; it's too bad that the writers didn't know what to do with her after this, giving her "yes sir/on it" parts more associated with Duke.

MORE TRIVIA:

• Lloyd lives at 1010 Koko Place, Kahala.
• The robbery at the end of the show takes place at the Island Shopper's Market, 14 Lani Street, phone number (a bogus one) 555-8600.
• Bernard Ching is seen, uncredited, as a grocery clerk. Jori Remus appears as the maid at Lloyd Dawson's house. Carole Kai is the clerk at the store where the woman robber bought her sweater. The other two members of Dawson's gang are Reggie Ho as Reed and Johnny Walker (the black guy Danno abused in A Distant Thunder) as Otis.
• The Five-O theme appears in Stevens' score briefly in the second act.
• The funeral for Lori's husband Kevin seems rather small. Typically police funerals are attended by huge amounts of cops, both from the dead cop's jurisdiction and also others all over North America.
• When Ben Dawson, formerly a medic in Vietnam, patches up his brother, who gets wounded by Lori during the opening market robbery, he says the word "Bull!" twice to his brother.

262. Though The Heavens Fall
Original air date: 10/18/79 -- Opening Credits -- End Credits

The bad guys in this show are members of Nu Epsilon ("Notable Enterprises"), an organization operating out of the exclusive Sportsmen's Game Country Club in Honolulu. They engage in "eye for an eye" vigilante justice against those who get off criminal charges on technicalities because of the "mush-brained courts." Their motto is "fiat justitia, ruat cælum," which means "Let justice be done, though the heavens fall." Richard Slade, played by Robert ("Brady Bunch") Reed, is the group's leader. At the beginning Slade deals with someone who beat the rap ... but how does Slade know where this guy is in the seedy part of town, and how does he know that the crook will follow him into a parking garage with one of his friends where "justice" can be dished out? When he goes to check out the club, operating on a hunch that only the idle rich would have the time to engage in such "sport," McGarrett runs into Diana Webster (Elyssa Davalos, daughter of Richard, who starred in #208, A Capitol Crime, and who was James Dean's brother in the film East of Eden). McGarrett met her at a governor's ball a couple of years before. He compliments her, "You're pretty." She says "My, how much you've grown," to which McGarrett retorts, "Touché!" (Davalos is very hot.) When McGarrett speaks to Diana's father Elliott (Dennis Patrick, who looks like the Man from Glad), who is the president of the club, McGarrett says he knows a friend who needs a job at the club (Truck, who will be undercover). Patrick asks, "Dark skinned?" McGarrett says, "Does that make a difference?" When Lori arrives at the office after stopping to check out a crime on the way there, Kimo asks her "What're we doing? Keeping banking hours, police lady?" (She doesn't respond, which is unusual, because during most of the show she acts very hyper.) Kimo and Lori are assigned to give protective custody to Meredith Howell (Michael Strong), a potential victim of the vigilante group, who escaped punishment after beating his wife to death because the arresting officers didn't read him his rights. In one of all of Five-O's stupidest sequences, Kimo and Lori sit outside his house in their car eating sandwiches while Howell is reminiscing over his dead wife's possessions inside. The conversation between the two of them in the car is unbelievably dull. Finally, Kimo feels the urge to talk to McGarrett, and goes into Howell's house to use the phone -- isn't there a radio in his car? Finding Howell gone, and a couple of empty liquor bottles on the floor, the two of them don't even consider the fact that the despondent Howell might have jumped off the balcony at the rear of his house, which is above a sheer cliff. What actually happened was: the vigilantes climbed up the cliff and the balcony and absconded with the passed-out Howell. Predictably, McGarrett is very pissed at Kimo, screaming, "Well, that was dumb, Kimo, really dumb!" Kimo replies, "Look, I know that ... I said I was sorry." McGarrett replies, "Sorry, hell!" concluding sarcastically with "OK, we'll never find him standing here, will we, Kimo. Get on it ... Truck might need some help, eh?" Kimo looks like he wants to kill McGarrett, but instead goes undercover, impressing Diana as an archery expert (seriously) and she gets him a job at the club right away. Even though he has only been working a couple of days, she is attracted to him, and the two of them go horseback riding on the club's 500 acre property where they run into some of the vigilantes. Kimo says to her that the vigilante group members are "male chauvinists" after she tells him that he is "the only real man on these premises." Kimo and Truck's covers are soon blown, and along with Howell, they are slated for execution by Nu Epsilon. When Diana hears of their capture, she says, "What do you think those macho clowns will do to them?" She tells McGarrett that the vigilantes' hideout is near "Chinaman's Hat on the North Shore." Last time I looked at a map of Oahu, Chinaman's Hat was on the east side near Waikane. Truck gets shot by one of the vigilantes, and rather than pick up Truck at the end with his helicopter (number N789PR) and take him to the hospital, McGarrett merely tells him and Kimo "Well done, see you at home, fellows!" McGarrett makes a profound speech about constitutional rights and the permissive society at the end to Slade, saying that although Howell beat his wife badly, he did not kill her. Instead, some punk who broke into their house and tried to steal her bracelet finished her off when Howell was passed out drunk. Then McGarrett tells Kimo to "bookem," and make sure that he reads Slade his rights. The music by Broughton is very good.

MORE TRIVIA:

• At the beginning of the show, McGarrett comes into his office complaining "Who made the coffee, or is it left over from last night"? Lori says "Not me." (No one else speaks up.)
• During the helicopter chase at the end, one of the stunts looks very dangerous.
• At the beginning, a toy monkey clapping cymbals is seen. Behind Slade, as he is walking down the street, you can see the marquee for the Esquire Theatre, which advertises "Coeds Stage Show."
• Brian Graham-Jones, who took part in this episode, sends along some interesting anecdotes.
• The vigilante group's activities are described as a "most dangerous game," a reference to a book by the same name which has seen multiple movie adaptations, the plot of which concerns a big game hunter on an island who chooses to hunt humans for sport.
• McGarrett tells Webster that his handicap (presumably golf) is seven. According to my wife, who plays golf, this is pretty damn good!
• Peggy Oumansky, the old woman who appeared in the earlier episodes F.O.B. Honolulu and Retire in Hawaii -- Forever, has a brief role as a spectator coming out of a courtroom.
• Kimo meets Diana not at the club, but on a public range, where she is practising for a tournament. How does he find her there? Does he know that the club needs an archery instructor (the previous one just quit)? And since when is Kimo an archery expert?

263. Sign of the Ram
Original air date: 10/25/79 -- Opening Credits -- End Credits

This show is a follow-up to season eleven's episode #240, Horoscope for Murder, with Jayne Meadows playing Jessica Humboldt, a "professional colleague" of Agnes du Bois, the astrologer in the previous show. Joe Moore, now a news anchor in Honolulu, has a major role -- the biggest of several he played -- as Pete Shore, a boxing contender whose life is totally ruled by Humboldt's predictions. Although he is no Robert De Niro in Raging Bull, Moore does a very good job. Humboldt describes McGarrett as "stubborn, disbelieving and a very handsome fellow," and keeps making incorrect guesses as to his sign. At the end when she finally figures out he is a Capricorn, she calls him "stubborn, opinionated, tenacious and goat-like." McGarrett replies, "Yes, and loyal too." Typical of a boxing show, there are gangsters who want to buy a piece of Shore, one of whom uses the line "I've got an offer you can't refuse." When Shore's manager Eddie Marco (Anthony Ponzini, a gangster in last season's Number One With a Bullet) is overselling "interests" in Shore to the tune of 240%, the music by Richard Clements sounds very much like Marvin Hamlisch's arrangement of Scott Joplin in the film "The Sting." Kimo has lots to do in this show, but Lori's part is boringly written. When she figures out the angle at which Toby Wilson (uncredited actor), who owned a piece of Shore, was shot near the beginning of the show, Kimo says "That's a good girl, Lori." McGarrett asks her to get a blood test from a fighter that Shore knocked out to determine if he was doped, she replies "Yes, sir," and rushes out of the office. Later, she muffs her lines when referring to "a picture of Eagleton [yet another gangster], the guy who got aw... off on parole." At the end of the show, it's obvious that the oversold Shore is going to win his championship fight, resulting in a huge loss for Marco. Marco sends Fiddler (Sonny Westbrook), a hitman associate of his who knocked off Wilson, to the rafers of the arena to also assassinate Shore with a long-range rifle in a scene reminiscent of finale of The Manchurian Candidate. When he corners Fiddler above the arena, McGarrett is uncommonly harsh: "Put it down or I'll blow your brains out!" Overall, this is a mundane episode, with Humboldt rattling off astrological mumbo-jumbo throughout. Unlike the previous show, there is no astrological consultant in the end credits.

MORE TRIVIA:

• Although he is a major character, Moore's credit at the end is smaller than the "guest" stars.
• I like the scene where Galen Kam as Lee Ting gets a massage from a woman in a bikini walking on his back (she looks like she is about 16).
• Laura Sode as Luana is in the credits, but doesn't appear in the show. Les Keiter is the announcer at ringside.
• There is mention of a "photo telex" which is used to send a picture from the mainland.
• The bookem is "Book him, murder one."
• According to an interview with Sharon Farrell, who played Lori in the twelfth season, Jack Lord changed Jayne Meadows' lines around so much, the actress broke out in a rash.

264. Good Help is Hard to Find
Original air date: 11/1/79 -- Opening Credits -- End Credits

This is the final show featuring Ross Martin as kumu boss Tony Alika, which also sews up some plot elements from #260, A Lion in the Streets. At the same time he is trying to import angel dust into the islands, Alika arranges for several "tips" to be given to Five-O through Truck's cousin Joey (Dave Lancaster), all of which turn out to be hoaxes which make Five-O look ridiculous. One of them features a kids' ukulele band with a sign "Welcome McGarrett and his Keystone Cops." Sharon Farrell as Lori says "When this hits the telly, we're gonna look like a bunch of fools." Similar to Ben Kanakea in #231, Tall On The Wave, Joey wants to get a recommendation from McGarrett for the police academy, despite the fact he failed the entrance exam three times. Ross Martin has some good scenes as Alika, incorporating the same kind of menace we find in Nehemiah Persoff's gangster performances. The boxing announcer from the previous show, Les Keiter, plays hard-hitting KLB-TV commentator Mark Maynard, whom McGarrett detests. McGarrett says Maynard "exploits freedom of the press for personal glory." In a broadcast, Maynard calls McGarrett "a joke ... a man of such personal vanity that good men have been resigning in disgust [this is the only hint in the series as to why Danno left Five-O] and have been replaced by incompetent sycophants." Five-O has to deal not only with Alika (Kimo tells him: "You'd fool around with kitten skins if you could turn a buck.") but also a frameup by Alika which turns into an Internal Affairs investigation targeting Kimo, who left the police department in Boston after his wife and child were murdered there. McGarrett points out to Lieutenant Dexter handling the investigation (Jason Evers) that Kimo was allowed to resign "without prejudice." The part of Dexter is lamely written compared to that of Fryer from I.A. in The Friends of Joey Kalima. McGarrett has some very strong words with the Governor over this investigation. There is a lapse in logic at the beginning of the show -- who took the picture of Kimo and Truck about to shoot at the jack in the box which appears in the Honolulu Advertiser, is seen with an insulting caption during Keiter's program on TV and also gets sent to Alika? It's unlikely that this was taken by HPD, who had other things on their mind at the time. The ending is full of banal dialogue. With ominous music by Stevens (an above-average score, as we would expect), Kimo recognizes Guido Marioni (John P. Ryan), Alika's mobster pal from the mainland, who was one of two brothers responsible for the murder of Kimo's family. The finale where Marioni falls off a cliff is awkwardly staged (again, like the finale of Tall on the Wave). Where did they expect Marioni to run to? As Marioni hangs by his fingertips, Kimo grabs his sleeve, which of course rips, sending the gangster to a grisly death. Kimo: "I really tried [to hold him] ... but I wish somebody would tell me why." McGarrett: "Because you're a cop, and that's what cops do ... we leave the rest up to the courts." Kimo: "Yeah, I guess that's it, Steve. It's really strange. I dreamed of nothing but revenge for years ... but I don't feel good now." McGarrett: "Revenge is a cruel word, Kimo ... it hurts only the people who practice it." Puh-leeze. William Smith does the best he can with this dialogue. At the finale, McGarrett arrests Alika, charging him with Joey's murder -- but on what evidence? One good thing about this show is the performance by Moe Keale as Truck -- probably his most dramatic of the twelfth season.

MORE TRIVIA:

• There is an elevator in the hall outside the Five-O office which is used twice during the show. As far as I recall, this is the only time this elevator is ever seen during the entire series.
• The safety deposit box used to frame Carew (which looks very similar to one I used at the Ilikai Hotel in 1996) is number 2261. Josie Over, the Five-O cleaning lady, is the one who plants a bug in McGarrett's office and helps frame Carew by getting his fingerprint on an envelope for the Wananoalili Hotel, where he lives. But if she doesn't know where the hotel is, why would she have a blank envelope from the place?
• When discussing Marioni's whereabouts, Alika pronounces his name correctly, but his manservant Billy Swan (Jerry Boyd) calls him "Mariano."
• Kimo uses the expression "ironical, isn't it?", something you would expect from McGarrett. The DVD subtitles translate this as just "ironic."
• At the beginning of the show, McGarrett is in Los Angeles giving a lecture on police security.
• A reel-to-reel tape recorder with the brand name obscured is seen, but the name of the tape -- BASF -- is not.
• Marioni is staying at the Hawaiian Regent Hotel.
• Edward Vierra, who plays the menacing Santos in A Bird in Hand... here is one of the crooks (uncredited) bringing the shipment of angel dust to Oahu.
• At the end of the show, McGarrett is wearing a jeans outfit similar to the one he wears in the series finale, Woe to Wo Fat. He tells Kimo to "book 'em" -- twice.

265. Image of Fear
Original air date: 11/8/79 -- Plot -- Opening Credits -- End Credits

This could have been a good "contemporary issues" show (divorce and its effect on kids), but -- alas -- it degenerates into another twelfth season mess in the fourth act. Linda Marsh is Joan Carter, formerly married to Assistant D.A. Gary Carter (Guy Boyd), both of them old friends of McGarrett. She is being harassed by Robert Kwon (Soon-Teck Oh, in his final Five-O appearance), a criminal that her ex-husband successfully prosecuted several years before, who was recently released from jail. Unfortunately, every time McGarrett and the Five-O team come to check on the incidents with Kwon, there is no evidence they can use to put him back in jail. Everyone is starting to wonder if Joan is heading towards a nervous breakdown such as she suffered a few years before during her tempestuous marriage. It's eventually revealed that the person behind Kwon's actions is the Carters' young daughter Annie (Katy Kurtzman) who's after a large inheritance currently in a trust fund, so she can run away to the mainland where her boyfriend moved. One has to seriously wonder if the kid is really capable of masterminding such an elaborate scheme (which is what McGarrett wonders about Kwon). As well, Kurtzman's character looks very young (the actress was around 14 when the show was filmed). The show would have been a lot better if the daughter was a rebellious older teenager instead of a young, spoiled brat type. The finale at Sea Life Park, after the money-grubbing Kwon is finally nabbed by McGarrett and HPD, is hideous. Annie appears accompanied by childish music (shades of Alex North's score to a movie on a similar subject, The Bad Seed) and McGarrett comes out with several stern statements. To the parents he remarks "That's gratitude for bringing up a child in the lap of luxury." To Annie he screams, "You just walked by your mother!" After the kid denounces her parents, McGarrett makes a big speech to her, saying "Stop it and face it!" which causes Annie to break down and momentarily reconcile with her mother and father. Then McGarrett tells Kimo to "book" the kid, muttering "Sorry ... sorry..." to her Gary. There are a couple of major goofs. The first is topographical. When McGarrett is on his way to Sea Life Park, he's seen driving down the road on the ocean side of the Ilikai Hotel (note the Canadian flag in the foreground) which actually leads to a dead end, and in the next scene he arrives at Sea Life Park, which is out in the sticks on the southeast corner of Oahu, about 10 miles from the Ilikai. The second is continuity-related. When McGarrett arrives at Joan's house to stop her from delivering money to Kwon (she has already left), he is confronted by Annie who sends him temporarily on a wild goose chase. Annie is holding a popcorn box with Sea Life Park written on it, an important clue which McGarrett flashes on later (why didn't her mother, who also saw it?). In the shots of Annie from behind, she is holding the popcorn box with her left hand so that it's up by her shoulder, but in the shots of her from the front, she has both hands at her side and is holding the box in front of her. Annie is seen eating from this popcorn box when she meets up with Kwon at Sea Life Park, where he works, to discuss their scheme. She still has the box when she is at home after this, and at the end of the show (is this the same box of popcorn?). There are also a couple of odd plot points. When Joan takes the money out of the bank for Kwon, why does the bank call Gary? After all, it was left by Joan's late mother for Joan to keep in trust for Annie. When she's off to deliver the money to Kwon, Joan searches in vain for a gun which her husband gave and which she put in a drawer -- what happened to it? Kwon suddenly has a gun after Joan gives him the money at the park, where he is employed. It seems a strange coincidence that the amount of money Kwon asks from Joan -- $100,000 -- is the exact amount in the trust fund. The score by Don Ray, which is OK, momentarily quotes the Five-O theme at one point, a rarity for later-season episodes, as well as the "trombone interval" theme.

MORE TRIVIA:

• When he talks to her at the beginning of the show, McGarrett tells Annie, "You're a big girl now, aren't you ... a pretty one too. Lots of boyfriends, I bet."
• The parrots which meet an untimely end in the show are called Nanday Conures. Kwon bought his own pair which "died" and presumably replaced them in the cage with the original live ones after Joan ran out of the house. When Joan talks to McGarrett about this, and sounds like she really is flipping out, the music has weird violin harmonics, which are brought back during the final scene with Annie.
• McGarrett tells Kimo that he wants to take a run on the beach after he goes home. I really get the feeling that William Smith would like his character to be doing things other than checking out pet shops in this show.
• Joan puts a bag from a grocery store on the table in her kitchen. On the bag is printed some offer that if you bring the bag back to the store, you will save 3 cents on your next food order. An ecology-minded store ahead of its time!
• McGarrett wears his blue leisure suit.
• Joan's house number is 526. The driveway to her house is very steep, which requires McGarrett to drive up it relatively slowly.

266. Use a Gun, Go to Hell
Original air date: 11/29/79 -- Plot -- Opening Credits -- End Credits

A surprisingly good show (for the twelfth season, anyway), with an interesting score by Bruce Broughton which makes you appreciate a composer who knows the show and knows what he is doing. As well, William Smith as Kimo gives a performance where he is actually interested in the proceedings. This is not a "gun goes from one person to another" episode like #167, Diary of a Gun. Andrew Duggan, in his final Five-O appearance, portrays Roger Bancroft, whose stolen gun was used to assassinate Senator Kurusu who lived next door to his beachfront estate at 6501 Pahana Street, Honolulu 96815 (protected by Pointsettia Security Systems, 808-555-6889). Bancroft, who has a large collection of firearms, is very much opposed to gun control, saying he "can't get police protection," though you have to wonder what he needs protection from. He and his former neighbor the senator were "violent political enemies." After Kurusu's murder, the gun ends up in the possession of blonde surfer type Rolly (Paul Koslo) for reasons that will be explained shortly. At the beginning of the show, Rolly's pal, the moronic punk Tanami (Richard Dimitri, star of Number One with a Bullet in the previous season) uses the gun to shoot bakery owner Sunada (Harry Chang) during a robbery. He is stabbed by Sunada, and left for dead by Rolly, who takes the gun with him, later to discard it on a beach. Sunada complains to the media and Five-O when Tanami is treated better by the cops than he is. McGarrett is very annoyed when Tanami is released for lack of evidence. Tanami is later shot and killed with the gun when he and Rolly are horsing around, and then the paranoid Rolly plugs his girl friend Perky (Nicole Ericson) accidentally with the gun, also killing her. McGarrett spouts off numerous anti-gun statements during the show. He talks of the fifty to sixty million guns in use in America, "every one of them capable of death and destruction." To the mother of a little girl who is shot when her brother finds the gun Rolly chucked on the beach, he says "The guns are out there everywhere ... and all the pointless pain and suffering could be prevented." At the end, when the senator's killer is revealed to be Bancroft's haranged son Elliott (Jack Stauffer) who "tried do something to make [himself] count ... in [his father's] eyes," McGarrett launches into an incredible rant: "Please don't give me that old cliché that 'Guns don't kill people, that only people kill people' ... that's nonsense, absolute nonsense! If there were no hand guns available out there, a hell of a lot of innocent people would still be alive. What is this love affair, what is this fascination Americans have for guns? It happens nowhere else in the world. When and where do the rights of you gun lovers stop and the rights of the public and the protection of life and limb begin?" I suspect that Jack Lord shared these sentiments.

MORE TRIVIA:

• Herman Wedemeyer has a lot to do in this show, perhaps the most action of any Five-O show. Duke interviews Tanami in the hospital, who laughs at him when Duke tries to connect him to the murder of Kurusu. It was maybe not a good idea to mention the Kurusu case, because Tanami gets grandiose ideas about blackmailing the gun's owner which lead to both his and Rolly's undoing. Later, Duke tails Rolly and Tanami to the house where Tanami gets shot, kicking the door down as Rolly flees. Rolly flees out the back door of his house. But when he is seen escaping in his red Ford convertible a few seconds later, he comes out of what looks like the garage of an apartment building, not a house.
• After Elliott murders Kurusu, he throws the gun over the cliff behind his (and his father's) house, where Rolly finds it. This is a pretty dumb move on Elliott's part, since it was quite likely that someone would find it there and if the cops got hold of it, it would be quickly identified it as his father's, especially since it was a relatively rare item, a 9mm German automatic HK special. The character of Elliott is not well-developed. His father nags him to shut up and let him do the talking when being interviewed by Kimo, but we don't really get the sense that this kid is so brow-beaten that he would commit a murder as a result. Elliott also has a lot of friends who hang out at his father' s place. You would think if his father was so controlling, Elliott wouldn't have any friends allowed at the place at all.
• After the robbery at Sunada's, Rolly and Perky drive through an area that looks like the mall where McGarrett got his hair cut in an earlier show. On the way out of this area, they pass Hawaii Kai Auto Parts.
• McGarrett is in such a hurry to leave his office with Kimo to pursue Rolly, who has been spotted by HPD, that he drops the phone, which falls not on the receiver, but on the floor.
• Rolly snoops in Bancroft's mailbox to figure out who he is. One of the letters is from J.T. Printing on Kanaka Avenue, Honolulu, HI 96816 (which doesn't sound like it is too far from Bancroft's house, based on the ZIP code). Later, at his girl friend's house, Rolly calls Bancroft after looking up his number in the phone book. Considering how security-conscious Bancroft is, wouldn't he have an unlisted number?
• At the finale, McGarrett, not putting himself in harm's way, commands Kimo to break down the door of the room where Elliott is reloading his father's gun, possibly to commit suicide.
• There are two lab technicians previously unseen on the show doing forensics on the bullets and shells, a white guy named Keoni (presumably Kevin O'Connor in the end credits) and an Asian one called Monty (uncredited).
• A sign in Rolly's room reads "Girls Topless Girls." Inside Perky's place is a sign saying "Support the Civic Purity League." Perky has a radio which has a police scanner that Rolly listens to to determine if someone is after him.
• Rolly uses the expression "Hey, bro" twice, rather than the correct "Hey, bra."
• Rolly arranges to meet Bancroft (which turns out to be Elliott) to pick up the blackmail money at Lookout Point on Tantalus Drive (which is on a mountain above Honolulu), but they actually meet on "Poinsettia approaching Skyline Drive" which is a lookout near the ocean.
• Nicole Erickson does a much better job acting in this episode than she did in season eleven's The Case Against Philip Christie.
• The police helicopter sesrching for Rolly has the number N9014F.

267. Voice of Terror
Original air date: 12/4/79 -- Opening Credits -- End Credits

Yet another -- and the worst -- show featuring Five-O's own brand of "radical revolutionaries." Cal Bellini gives a ridiculous, scenery-chewing performance as the screaming, psychotic Karl (as in "Marx"), leader of the "World Liberation Army," who have connections to the mid-East and Germany. Among their group's accomplishments are blowing up a school bus, killing 27 children. One has to seriously wonder about this organization when at the beginning of the show they are seen driving around in a Cadillac and wearing trendy clothes while making statements like "solidarity forever, brothers." Following a shootout after being pursued for a traffic violation, Karl kidnaps HPD female officer Sally Dean (Mary Angela), referring to her as "little girlie pig." Using the police radio in her car (car #77), he asks to be put through to the "head pig." The cop standing behind the dispatcher immediately says "Get Five-O." Karl and his co-conspirator Willa (Anne Zimmerman) drive Sally to a hill near Koko Head where they make their demands, including a plane to take them out of the country. Karl taunts McGarrett via Central Dispatch, slapping Sally around, saying "I'm not a sadist and I don't particularly enjoy torture." The Governor is very concerned over the kidnapping, saying "Our ability to maintain law and order is at stake." He demands that McGarrett resolve the situation quickly, which results in the death of a police officer, something for which the Governor apologizes to McGarrett. When Karl wants Sally to speak in favor of their cause over the police radio to a broadcast it's being patched through to on the local radio station, she turns to him and yells, "You can drop dead, you murderous punk!" He belts her in the face. McGarrett's technique for dealing with the hostage taking is to prolong it as long as possible, which is something that could be said about this show in a major way. The constant give-and-take between McGarrett and Karl, with McGarrett threatening to terminate the conversation and letting someone else do the negotiating, becomes very tiresome after a while. When Truck and another cop climbing up the hill, pretending to be backpackers out for the day, have their cover blown, with Truck wounded and the other cop fatally shot, McGarrett is at his wits' end. McGarrett finally has his ace in the hole at the end of the show when he figures out that Karl's cohort Mark (Kaz Garas), who was left for dead during the police shootout earlier, was the one who made an anonymous tip that resulted in the arrest of two of their fellow travellers Stephan and Gino, recently convicted in court after pleading guilty, saying words to the effect that they didn't recognize the court's jurisdiction. The leather-capped Mark, who had a serious disagreement with Karl over tactics at the beginning of the show, tells McGarrett that their leader has "put his bloated ego above our revolutionary goals." McGarrett then pretends to be Mark, walking up the hill with two cops in disguise as the supposedly now-freed Stephan and Gino. It's amazing that Karl cannot see through this. The music by Michael Isaacson with military overtones at the beginning when the terrorists are marching to the beach tries a bit too hard to make a point, but is generally good, despite the sweet-sounding finale.

MORE TRIVIA:

• The police chase near the beginning of the show ends up on what looks like a highway under construction where there are virtually no other vehicles to be seen (as happens in some other episodes).
• When Bellini yells at McGarrett over the radio, "Come on, McGarrett, are you there?", he sounds like James Cagney in White Heat.
• This is the only acting credit listed at IMDB for Anne Zimmerman. She has a resemblance to stock players Luanna Costello and Josie Over.
• The license number on the cop car that Karl commandeers changes from 8B-5002 during the shootout near the beginning to 8B-5001 when Truck is chained to it near the end.
• Danny Kamekona plays Sally's fellow officer Tom Kellogg, who, like Mark, is shot during the confrontation at the beginning of the show, and left on the road.
• After McGarrett orders Duke to broadcast a tape of Mark's phone conversation so that Karl will know that he was the one who ratted them out, Duke inserts the tape in a Technics cassette player. The explanation as to how Mark betrayed Stephan and Gino, who were with Karl eating at a local restaurant, is very confusing.
• When McGarrett finally gets to talk to Sally via the police radio, he says "Hi, honey." At the end, when Truck is about to shoot Willa, McGarrett tells her "He means it, honey."
• A City and County Ambulance is seen at scene at the base of Koko Head.
• When Karl goes to a hardware store where he makes a scene over getting a portable radio so he can monitor the broadcast to the world he is going to be making, next door is a place called "Liquors Quicker."
• The Governor looks very old and tired.

268. A Shallow Grave
Original air date: 12/11/79 -- Opening Credits -- End Credits

University student Mike Harper (John David Carson) comes to Hawaii from the mainland. He keeps seeing peculiar visions which may be connected to a $2 million jewel robbery which happened twenty years before, just as one of the participants in the crime, Phil Coleman (John Ireland), is being released from prison. With the help of Dr. Ramsey (Linda Ryan), a psychologist who is into hypnotic regression, parapsychology, reincarnation and occult phenomena as well as his mother (Electra Gailas) who reveals that he was adopted and is later discovered to have been visiting the islands with his original parents at a very young age, Mike is able to join all the dots together and help McGarrett solve the case, which just happens to be one that the Governor as district attorney prosecuted way back when. Kimo's performance in this episode is particularly stupefying -- he admits he doesn't know what "déjà vu" means and at one point when McGarrett passes the conversation over to him, we are left holding our breath. McGarrett bosses his staff around in a very annoying manner, especially Lori, who is made to act like his maid. Perhaps this explains her slouching posture in the Five-O office. Bill Edwards, who once played Washington bigshot Jonathan Kaye, here plays John Tarnow, who supposedly murdered Rick Miller, Coleman's partner in the crime after Coleman left Miller to die close to their house. The final scene where Mike stumbles into the Tarnows' shed full of mannequins, which have been haunting him in flashbacks throughout the show, is far-fetched -- would they have stayed hanging from the ceiling for twenty years? The music by Ray during Mike's hypnosis is banal, incorporating the children's song "This old man" as Mike recalls his birthday parties as a young child; at other times the composer uses the "trombone interval" theme from earlier seasons to excess. The opening hotel scenes are filmed at the Ilikai, where Mike fills out a registration card. Coleman is murdered in a room at the War Memorial Natatorium -- it takes several minutes for the viewer to figure out who got knocked off, since the body is seen only briefly from an odd camera angle and no one mentions any names until the next act. During Mike's flashback scenes, the sun can be seen shining behind the manufactured rain. The subject matter makes the show interesting, but the finale is cloying.

MORE TRIVIA:

• Much of the dialogue for Kimo and Lori is particularly clueless. Kimo somehow knows about Dr. Ramsey, which is surprising.
• When Mike is hypnotized, Dr. Ramsey records what he is saying on a reel-to-reel tape recorder with 10" reels. Mike's reaction to what he witnessed with Coleman and Miller years before is so extreme, his heart stops and he has to be revived with a shot of adrenaline. Following this, Mike escapes from the hospital, going again to the Tarnows' shack in a brown Toyota Corolla where someone left the keys in the ignition.
• Two newspapers are seen, The Honolulu Advertiser with a story about Coleman getting out of jail, and The Honolulu Daily News, which identifies Mike as the prime suspect in Coleman's murder.
• When Mrs. Tarnow opens the shed, thinking that the loot from the robbery is buried there, the key is hanging on a nail right beside the door. The loot is not in the shed, but close by, under the exact spot where her husband buried Miller's body years before. Thus the title of the episode: a shallow grave.
• The bookem is "OK, Kimo, book 'em, murder one."

269. The Kahuna
Original air date: 12/18/79 -- Opening Credits -- End Credits

This episode takes place mostly at the fictional Lono Bay, a couple of hours away from Honolulu by helicopter, though Kimo can pick up a phone there and say "patch me through to McGarrett" to the operator and be connected within mere seconds without even giving the phone number. Cathy Lee Crosby plays medical examiner Dr. Karen Lynch, who wants to know why two local kids suddenly died, but finds herself thwarted by local superstition and burial customs, not to mention the police on this "company island." The beginning of the show has similarities to #227, The Big Aloha, opening with a funeral featuring a Hawaiian song, and the company doctor is the 70-year-old Dr. Cooper (Charles Peck) who Lynch suggests has "missed something" when he signed the two kids' death certificates. There is a sub-plot here where Truck is contaminated by radiation while on a Honolulu case. During this investigation, Kimo is doing surveillance in the best Five-O tradition, talking on the radio to McGarrett with an open window (not too quietly, either) while a demoted employee from Oahu Power Company out for revenge places a radioactive container in a car nearby, without even bothering to see if he is being observed. As a result of the contamination, Truck -- who Kimo says weighs 260 pounds -- becomes ill while investigating at Lono Bay. He thinks he is under the spell of the local kahuna or sorcerer-like priest. As in previous episodes like #132, Anybody Can Build a Bomb, the effects of radiation are nothing serious, with Truck eventually recovering despite going into twitching spasms, sweating heavily and collapsing. (The explanation at the end of the show at to why Truck acted this way is convoluted.) The HPD bomb squad is on the scene at the power company to check out the cannister containing the radioactive material, but they don't seem to know what it is. It takes McGarrett to prompt them into checking, and then the squad has a Geiger counter at the ready. One of the cops holds the cannister with insulated gloves, but the other holding the Geiger counter has bare hands. At the beginning, McGarrett says he will arrange with Truck's divisional commander to hold Truck over for another special assignment, suggesting that Truck wasn't a full-fledged member of Five-O. Doug Mossman plays Lono Bay Chief of Police Kaana who is indifferent to Dr. Lynch's concerns about holding an autopsy (which McGarrett mispronounces wrongly when she meets with him in his Honolulu office). Don Knight appears in his final Five-O role as George Lamb, the proprietor of the Lono Bay "emporium" who is responsible for the deaths of the two kids, plus a third. Lamb's character development leaves a lot to be desired. After doing little for most of the show, he goes totally crazy near the end, nearly molesting Crosby and threatening her with a gun while hysterically blabbing away about murdering the kids, who were threatening a multi-million dollar coral harvesting operation he was undertaking off a beach which the kahuna had declared kapu (forbidden). McGarrett shows up on the island at the end in his black leisure suit. This episode features a shot of Kimo similar to the one in the credits -- the angle is slightly different. There are some beefcake scenes with William Smith in a swimsuit, and Crosby is pretty shapely herself. Whenever Kimo is with Lynch at the beach, he can't keep from grabbing her. Moe Keale has a few good lines as a travelling "discount man" and some interesting comments about his Hawaiian-ness, when he says he considers Paul Kualu, the Kahuna (Edward Larry Akau) to be "evil." The show is directed by former director of photography, Robert L. Morrison. Morton Stevens' score is far better than this episode deserves.

MORE TRIVIA:

• When Kimo tells McGarrett over the phone about the kahuna's curse on Truck, McGarrett says "That sounds like something out of Captain Cook's voyages." But McGarrett himself was the victim of a kahuna's curse in the opening episode of the season, A Lion in the Streets! Since this show was previous to The Kahuna in both broadcast and production order, this comment doesn't make sense. Did someone on the writing staff forget to check this?
• Kimo is very bossy to the ailing Truck, when the latter suggests something fishy is going on at the forbidden beach, saying "Didn't you check it out, Truck?" in an annoyed tone. Kimo is also disrespectful when Truck brings up the kahuna as a possible suspect in the murders, asking why Dracula and Frankenstein aren't on his list as well. He apologizes for this, using the term "bro" (rather than the correct "bra' ... which he uses wrongly again later in the show).
• While Lamb keeps his Jeep in "the warehouse next to the store," according to Dr. Cooper, and Lynch goes into the warehouse right next to where Kimo is inspecting other Jeeps near the end, when Lamb and Lynch drive away from the scene, they seemingly come out the other side of the building. Kimo jumps into one of the Jeeps and pursues the two of them. Even though he has only been on the island for a short time, he knows a short cut which enables him to catch up to them quickly. The license plate on Lamb's Jeep is 4F-9711.
• Although Lynch questions Dr. Cooper's competence during the opening funeral scene, the two of them are very chummy later. One would have thought her comments would have gotten back to him, considering the tight-knit community on the island.
• Doug Mossman's appearance in this show is his last on Five-O. Ditto for Terry Plunkett, who plays the Lono Island barber and Emma Veary.
• The lettering on the bomb disposal truck seems to be made by the same person who made the sign on the Oahu Power Company's outside wall.
• The "bookem" is "OK, Kimo, book 'em, murder one, three counts."

270. Labyrinth
Original air date: 12/25/79 -- Opening Credits -- End Credits

WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS IN THIS RE-VIEW. This episode features what must be one of the stupidest lines in all of Five-O. James Olson, playing Dr. Kenneth Ames, "the dean of plastic surgeons," doesn't want to admit to Five-O that his wife has been kidnapped and suggests that she is on the mainland. This causes Kimo to blurt out, "Yeah, and I'm the Queen of the May." (Ames considers Kimo's response to be "insolent.") Despite this, both Kimo and Lori do some hard work investigating the case. Anthony Innéo plays the swishy hairdresser Georgio, lisping that Olsen's wife Christine (the very sexy Tricia O'Neil) was "an absolute dog to work on" (is this an in-joke referring to her performance in season eleven's The Bark and the Bite?) and "not a happy woman." When one of his co-workers (Andrea Pike) makes a remark about Christine's nail polish (an important clue), Georgio minces, "Gloria ... get ... lost!" Lori later refers to the hairdresser as "Gorgeous Georgio." Some of the dialog is bizarre. When he returns from dumping the ransom money in the ocean, Ames asks Kimo, "Are we having a luau? You should have told me, Mr. Carew, I'd have roasted a pig." At the beginning when Ames meets with Five-O and his lawyer Dave DiMarco (Lyle Bettger), he seems disinterested in his wife's fate, as he is after he makes the ransom drop. There is a good reason for this. Christine was in a serious car accident a couple of years before where she suffered serious facial injuries. Ames reconstructed her face so she would look like his girl friend Lisa (also played by O'Neill). Lisa and Ames' chauffeur Larry Wilkens (Ted Hamilton) team up with him to kidnap Christine, after which DiMarco is able to get his hands on some of Christine's bank savings to help pay the ransom money because he has her power of attorney. The idea is that Wilkins will get paid off and Ames will run away with Lisa. There are so many plot twists and double crosses in the last act that leaving the room is not advisable. There are some big questions at the end, such as how did Lisa (pretending to be Christine) tie herself up in the shack on the beach used to hide Ames' wife, and what did Lisa do with Christine's body after she killed her (or so it is suggested at the end). Lisa knocks off Wilkins by putting a bomb on the doctor's yacht which they are using to escape in the direction of Brazil ... the special effects for this explosion are better quality than normal. Despite its faults, this is a good show, especially to see O'Neil deliver a dramatic performance in her double role.

MORE TRIVIA:

• Poor Duke! After he and Kimo grill Wilkens the chauffeur, who is discovered with head injuries after Mrs. Ames' disappearance, Kimo tells Duke to put out an APB on the kidnappers, and then in a bossy way reminiscent of McGarrett, to put a 24-hour tail on Wilkens.
• The scene before the first commercial "wave" is one of the least suspenseful act endings in the whole series.
• The music by Robert Drasnin, which is OK for the most part, suffers a momentary lapse into Post/Carpenter cheapness at the end when the Five-O crew run to the shack on the beach.
• A Craig portable tape recorder, similar to those used in Mission: Impossible (the control switch is in a V-type hollow), is used -- interestingly, director Barry Crane did several episodes of that series.
• Chauffeur Wilkins speaks with a Cockney accent, but actor Hamilton is actually Australian. His use of the word "mate" is a clue here, though both of these "languages" share this expression. Hamilton later appeared in the Jack Lord-directed TV pilot M Station Hawaii.
• Christine's old Texas driver's license (number D37143) says that her address was 1240 Rodeo Rd., Dallas 75149. It expires on her birthdate in 1980, there are no restrictions, her date of birth is 12/22/42, her height is 5'6" and her eyes are brown.
• Private eye Nick Rossiter (Don Lamond) -- who calls Christine (who was actually Lisa) a "fruitcake" -- has the phone number 808-555-6340 on his business card, and lives at 1246 Opaka. He is very confused by the two women, saying that Christine hired him to find who was her husband's girl friend, and it turned out to be "herself."
• Lisa makes a call regarding the ransom payment from the beach shack using a battery-powered mobile phone and a portable tape recorder. The voice on the recorder is a man's -- whose?
• McGarrett wears a leisure suit. He has a couple of major brainstorms in this show including "There's more than a simple kidnapping going on here." The "bookem" at the end is "OK, Kimo, book her, murder one."

271. School for Assassins
Original air date: 1/1/80 -- Opening Credits -- End Credits

In this show, which is straight out of The A-Team, Lloyd Bochner as the English-accented Colonel Avery runs a terrorist school in suburban Honolulu (I don't suppose it is listed in the Yellow Pages). "Special guest star" Gary Lockwood, who was over 40 when he filmed this episode and looks very old and out-of-shape, plays Kelsey, one of Avery's pupils who has to enter the school surreptitiously and make his way to Avery's office in record time in order to graduate to the next level of his training. The beginning of the show is very strange. Kelsey assumes the identity of one of the employees of the school, Jonathan Dempsey, by taking Dempsey's clothes and handcuffing him to his car, dressed only in his underpants. Then he records Dempsey's voice on a portable tape recorder, which he uses to bypass the security entrance to the school, where employees are admitted via voice recognition. Kelsey is wearing a weird bondage-type leather vest which has all these special pockets and clips which are presumably for the assassin trade. Very kinky! The whole business of Kelsey disguising his voice via the tape (which, unlike a typical ca-sette recording, is near-digital in quality) is ridiculous. How many people work for Avery's school anyway? Like hundreds? Thousands? You would suspect that the security guards who have to monitor Lockwood's entrance would know what Dempsey looks like. Wouldn't they be seeing Dempsey come to work every day? Once he gets inside the building, Kelsey turns around and almost shows us the crack in his ass, since he doesn't seem to be wearing any underpants (obviously since he never took Dempsey's, I guess). Kelsey puts a picture in front of a security camera using a clamp which fails to take into account the focal length of the camera lens. He also bypasses an electric eye by pointing a flashlight into one of the detectors. Despite all this, Kelsey manages to pass his exam, and is primed for a big operation involving the assassination of the mideast oil sheikh Ahmed Bishara, who is meeting soon with oil billionaire John Ellington (Monte Markham) at the latter's palatial home on the Nu'uanu Pali. The security provided by Five-O and HPD for Ellington at this location is unbelievably bad. When Ellington escapes from being cooped up by the cops in his mansion in his old college classmate Ted Morley's (Christopher Law) Honda, why don't the cops recognize him? The bad guys also seem confused, saying "Morley's come out," and they proceed to tail him to the beach, even though they are after Ellington himself. Why do the cops let Morley in to visit in the first place, or why do they admit the blond bombshell terrorist from Avery's school, Idra Dassan (Lynne Ellen Hollinger), who is posing as an OPEC security agent? Unreal! When Idra shoots Truck (taking her gun from a garter-belt holster reminiscent of a western movie), he says "She just nicked me," adding, in an attempt to be funny, "She ruined my best shirt!" The security for Avery's house is also pretty mediocre, since Kimo can infiltrate it in the guise of a telephone repairman with little difficulty. The ending is terrible. Ellington offers McGarrett a job running his oil company, saying "You could have been a rich man" when McGarrett refuses. McGarrett says "I am rich, in many ways" -- the freeze frame has him smilingly contentedly, looking like a giant glazed donut. About the only thing maintaining my interest in this show was actress Pamela Susan Shoop as Jennifer Fair, who meets Ellington when she stumbles into the executive boarding lounge at the San Francisco airport feeling faint, and he takes a liking to her. Later she meets him on Waikiki where she foils an attempt on his life. The sight of Shoop wearing a bikini while surfing is very interesting. Markham's gentle portrayal of the oil kingpin as someone totally oblivious as to why anyone would want to do him harm, also engenders my sympathy. But overall, this episode is a real stinker.

MORE TRIVIA:

• The main titles don't show up until about 3:42 into the first act.
• The quality of video signals broadcast on security cameras in this show is terrible.
• Silent-screen actress "Miss" Dorothy Mackaill, who also appeared in #202, Target -- A Cop, is in this episode as an old lady who likes to snoop on her neighbors (including Avery) with her telescope.
• Why does Avery join the mission at the end? Just so his character can be eliminated in the final confrontation with McGarrett? Bochner, who was around age 55 when the show was filmed, seems too old to be scaling walls and performing similar stunts.
• There is a reference to the food at the Halekulani Terrace being very good. This may refer to the Hau Terrace in the Halekulani Hotel.
• Prior to their assault on Ellington's place, Avery and Kelsey, disguised as HPD cops, and several others are seen going through a trap door in the floor. But where are they? Ellington's house? His own house?
• McGarrett mispronounces the sheik's name as Beh-sar-a, rather than Beh-share-a.

272. For Old Times Sake
Original air date: 1/8/80 -- Opening Credits -- End Credits

A halfway house/school for girls, Hale Maluhia (House of Safety), is going to be shut down because it owes $15,000 in back taxes. First, some of the girls from the school try to steal an expensive necklace from a jewellery store, but their efforts are a flop, and they end up getting a stern lecture from McGarrett. One of them, Wendy, is played by Kelly Palzis, later Kelly Preston and Mrs. John Travolta. Then English-accented Willie McFee (Peter Bromilow), previously known as Monty Pearson, an ex-counterfeiter currently employed by the home as a gardener and handyman, decides to come out of "retirement" to help them out. The boss of the halfway house, Dolly Simmons (Neva Patterson), is an old pal of McGarrett, who tells him: "You missed your calling, you should've been an actor." Willie, whose engraving is admired even by Secret Service man John Holland (Paul Udell), spends two of his bogus $20 bills in the Hula Supply Center. In a far-fetched coincidence, Kimo visits the same place buying items for a luau and gets the bills in change. McGarrett and Kimo then play a game of "Hawaiian poker" comparing serial numbers on the bills and notice that they are the same. (Gambling seems a bit out of character for McGarrett.) Willie visits his old partner in crime, Eddie Riford (George Herman) who runs a Honolulu print shop, who he hasn't seen for 18 years, and calls in some of his other old cronies from overseas -- Joe Morgan from Miami Beach (Dick Fair), Sam Chong from Singapore (Yankee Chang) and Pierre Soule (Michel F. Martin) from Monte Carlo. Why Willie does this doesn't make sense, since he seems quite capable of printing the bogus bills on his own at the show's conclusion. The show, which starts out with a cute premise, goes downhill rapidly when two brutal thugs from a syndicate which hired Willie to make the printing plates way back when threaten him and Dolly. First Dolly picks up a flowerpot where Willie has hidden the plates and throws it the goons. It shatters on the floor, and they find the plates immediately. Later, she stupidly blurts out "It's an art, well it is, engraving is!" One of the thugs, Sol Bruno, tells her to can it. He is played by Rick Marlow, who appeared in four earlier shows. The episode ends up at a shack on Pebble Island where Willie and Eddie (the latter now murdered by the two hoods) were going to print the money. The thugs shoot Joe Morgan dead and threaten everyone else for an interminably long period of time while McGarrett ties a rope attached to a motorboat around one of the shack's legs, and Kimo drives the boat away, causing the shack to collapse. Kimo seems to get back to land very quickly. McGarrett seems totally indifferent to the fate of Joe Morgan. The banal and sentimental finale has McGarrett meeting Willie in jail.

MORE TRIVIA:

• Bill Bigelow plays the manager of the jewellery store where the girls try to steal the necklace. When he chases them into the mall (presumably the Ala Moana Shopping Center), he seemingly leaves the store unattended.
• The music by Cacavas (his only twelfth season score) sounds like a Carpenters' song at the beginning.
• Even in an episode as mundane as this, how nice to see a driving sequence when Monte and the girls are escaping from the robbery which does not use a process shot. There are also numerous views of downtown Honolulu during the show. The home's station wagon has the license plate number 9C-6310.
• In Eddie's print shop, a 1979 calendar showing the month of October is seen hanging on the wall.
• The gun used to murder Eddie is determined to be a .45 calibre automatic with a silencer, according to the ballistics report. Is it really possible to determine that a silencer was used?
• McGarrett wears a blue and a black leisure suit in this episode.
• The bookem at the end is "Book them all."

273. The Golden Noose
Original air date: 1/15/80 -- Opening Credits -- End Credits

The primary attraction of this episode is major babe Irene Yah Ling Sun playing Nadira, in her third and final Five-O appearance. Her geologist boyfriend James Weaver (Joe Moore) has found a huge deposit of uranium which will make her country of "Baradak, SE Asia" incredibly wealthy. But Weaver is knocked off by Jonas Halloran (Ed Lauter), a soldier of fortune and aide to the current prime minister. A delegation from Baradak winds up in Honolulu where $150 million worth of gold bullion has been stored during the country's recent period of instability, with the intention of taking it back home, now that the country has entered an era of peace. However, Halloran, whose supposedly Irish accent wanders all over the place, has his own ideas about taking the gold and using it to buy arms on the black market. Halloran is very annoyed when he finds out that Nadira has pursued him to Honolulu ... and that McGarrett is "taking the word of a native girl -- a jilted native girl" over his. When Halloran's East Indian bodyguard Le Doc (Kimo Hugho) follows Nadira with the intention of killing her, he pushes her towards the traffic when she is standing at a street corner,. However, she falls to the right and he drops to the left, but in the next shot she is shown standing up, and the bodyguard falls on the street in front of a truck and his turban is knocked off and not seen -- a major mess of continuity. In Halloran's Ilikai hotel room, Nadira overhears him talking to junk dealer Jan Schyler, a.k.a. The Dutchman (John A. Hunt) about the weapons he wants to purchase. After Halloran finds her, for some inexplicable reason, he lets her go, and she manages to track Dutchman down, and gets into the scrapyard through a door while employees are going home from work and locking the main gate right beside her. McGarrett and Kimo are close behind, and they knock the heavy corrugated aluminum gate down with their car -- which is not the Mercury Grand Brougham. This car doesn't seem to have suffered much damage. Dutchman is cornered with this car, but he is assassinated by Halloran who is somehow able to climb to the top of piles of cars and take deadly aim with a large rifle. With the help of a scientific genius, Wriggins (Bill Bigelow), Halloran then proceeds to remove the gold bullion from its supposedly inpenetrable vault in the Security Bank of Oahu using a laser, shooting it through the floor of the bank and causing the gold to melt, running down ceramic tubes into molds. This whole procedure is idiotic, not to mention the fact that the area under the bank is accessed via some "old World War II tunnel" under the bank which "leads down to an abandoned sewer project." (If the road in the tunnel is so unused, why is there a yellow line down the middle of it?) Both Wriggins and Halloran wear thick gloves and protective glasses when the laser machine is being operated via some sci-fi-like console. This is the episode where McGarrett figures out what is going on in the bank vault because a thermometer on the side of the bank (the sensor for which is on the outside of the building beside the vault -- convenient!) keeps going up despite the fact that it is the middle of the night (which is hard to believe because the whole sequence is obviously shot during the daytime). I like the way that McGarrett gets a map of the city under the bank from a city engineer in about 10 minutes despite the late hour. At the end, McGarrett tells Kimo to "see if you can spot them [the bad guys] from top side" -- not taking any risks himself as usual. The music, by Les Hooper, is funky and kind of cool in spots. A good McGarrett quote to Halloran: "My game is lawbreakers ... what's your game?"

MORE TRIVIA:

• At the beginning of the show, after Nadira tells her boyfriend Weaver "I love you," he replies, "We'll explore that later..." The two of them engage in some pretty passionate smooching. Alas, Moore has another "red shirt" role like he did in season ten's Deep Cover.
• When the governor meets the representatives from Baradak at the airport, he has sideburns and his hair is ruffled by the wind.
• For someone who deals in expensive arms, The Dutchman's business is a typical scrap yard full of junk.
• Ed Fernandez, who played the Consul in #7, The Ways of Love, plays Baradak stooge, P. Sandifer. This is his last Five-O appearance, as it is for Bill Bigelow, Joe Moore and Colin de Silva (Premier Lon Tho).
• If there is $150 million of gold in the bank vault, and gold is worth $600 an ounce, this would be around 7.8 tons of gold. It is highly unlikely this amount of gold could be processed using the laser beam and related equipment during the three-hour time frame mentioned by Wriggins..
• The delegation from Baradak arrives on Air Niugini, a real airline which is the national airline of Papua New Guinea.
• During their first confrontation, McGarrett tells Halloran Nadira's name (she tried to approach Halloran when he arrived at the airport and was taken into custody). Stupid!
• A closeup of the phone on McGarrett's desk reveals that the number is still 732-5577, not some generic number. There are 6 rows of buttons vertically, of which two sets can be seen. They start with 2362, then go into the range 2369 to 2379 (a total of 12 extensions). Nadira calls McGarrett on extension 2376.
• Wriggins says the melting point of gold is 1945 °F. The actual figure is 1947.52 °F.
• The bookem is "OK, Kimo, book 'em, murder one."

274. The Flight of the Jewels
Original air date: 3/1/80 -- Opening Credits -- End Credits

A show with an interesting idea -- clever university students steal the Hawaiian royal jewels from an exhibition using remote-controlled planes. There are some lapses in logic, though. After one of their planes filled with "glycerol trinitrate" hits the outside museum wall and blows a hole in it, cops are shown running towards the building. Nick Zano (Linwood Boomer), one of the guards inside, who is also one of the clever students, yells out through the hole "Poison gas!" and the outdoor cops seemingly split. In the next scene where a second plane arrives to pick up the jewels, the cops aren't there. But when it takes off a couple of minutes later, the cops are all back with weapons drawn, pointing at the hole in the wall and they just stand there as the plane takes off. Nick and the museum's security boss Al Larkin (Christerpher Neddels) rush outside to join the guards who are still pointing their guns at the hole, but the plane has already left! During the robbery while the gas-masked Nick is grabbing the jewels and loading them in the plane (the plane seems awfully small to accommodate this booty), shouting instructions over a mike in the plane to co-conspirator Neal (Jeff Daniels) on the roof of a building far away, no one inside the museum seems to notice or hear, and it's not that smoky or noisy, despite the sound of the alarm. A cop car on the way to the robbery flips over another vehicle. When Five-O analyzes the video tape of the robbery later with a view looking out the hole made by the first plane, it's the same as what we have just seen -- there's no way these shots could have been filmed by the museum's video cameras. McGarrett talks of analyzing the video footage with an "electronic filter" which can supposedly penetrate the smoke. He also refers to a "Straub homing device" which is to be inserted with the ransom money that Mohai (Tommy Fujiwara), an agent from the company insuring the jewels, will pay to get the stones back. Kwan Hi Lim plays the slimy money launderer Hank Yamura, whom McGarrett describes as ruthless. He takes the jewels from Nick and Neal, saying "Ten million in a plastic jar -- you punks are all class!" The final scene where Yamura's car is tailed by a plane down a mountainside road is questionable -- could McGarrett and the students really see the car from that angle? The plane crashes in front of the car with a tiny explosion which causes the car to skid violently (the camera looks sped up) ... Yamura and his thugs are totally incapacitated until Truck arrives moments later. McGarrett has a big speech to the students at the end, saying "You're felons -- indelibly marked!", concluding with "God, what a waste..." The music by Robert Drasnin is serviceable, and has several moments where it sounds a bit like John Barry's music for James Bond films.

Mike Miyashiro, who played Jerry Otami, one of the students in this episode, sends along some interesting reminiscences:

"Jeff Daniels was a young unknown back then but it was clearly apparent to me that his talent was special. He was a loner who carried his guitar to the set everyday. But very serious about the craft of acting. I remember him describing the best acting lesson he received. It was in a class where the professor asked another actor how he would convey "intimidation." Without speaking a word, the other actor took out a real switchblade knife and simply pointed it at Jeff. An excellent lesson about communication without words and one I remember to this day. Whenever I see Jeff in a new film now-a-days, I jokingly tell friends how I feel sorry for him still stuck in a rut doing the same "movie star" stuff all these years.

"Lynwood Boomer was always hanging around the tech guys on the set. Very interested in the process of filming. I remember him as being very bright, inquisitive, funny and yet down to earth. No surprise, he turns up as a producer/writer for his own hit show "Malcom in the Middle" not long after.

"On the set, Jack Lord was VERY intimidating. But I was struck how after 12 long seasons (and doing every scene with cue cards), he was still very much concerned about the quality of the acting on the show. I remember at the end of a long day and near losing daylight, the director was hurrying to wrap up a close-up of Jack's final "book em" speech after catching us bad kids. After the first take, the director said "print." But Jack insisted on one more take that actually was a better performance.

"I also had to do some post-production overdubs and was surprised/terrified that Jack was actually the one directing these. (another example of his caring about the show's details) You are alone in a dark room with headphones listening to the initial recordings and trying to duplicate them. Not easy to do several weeks after primary filming and without the flow of the moment. But in this setting, Jack was surprisingly a very nurturing, patient coach... a completely opposite persona. While known for his tantrums and impatience as the star... as a director, he was quite good. Even taught me some techniques and tricks that were effective. These are the memories of Jack Lord I appreciate as it was a unique chance to see the artist behind the makeup."

MORE TRIVIA:

• Last Five-O appearance of Tommy Fujiwara. The money which Fujiwara's character wants to put in the ransom remote-controlled plane consists of $1,000 bills, which went out of circulation around 1969.
• McGarrett wears a leisure suit; he also has a Julius Caesar haircut briefly. He refers to the remote-controlled planes as "adult toys." Jack Lord looks very old in this show.
• At a meeting in the Five-O office, McGarrett gives Kimo suggestions for things to investigate, but Truck leaves instead of Kimo, who stays to talk to McGarrett.
• Unlocking the museum doors is controlled by Larkin's palm print -- a bit too sci-fi. And what if Larkin was really incapacitated and was not able to open the doors?
• Jerry Otami drives a cool yellow Mustang convertible, license number N-5903.
• Nick refers to Jerry as "Jerry-san; Jerry returns the favor, calling him "Nick-san.".
• When the students worry about whether McGarrett will notice a minute and a half of footage from the video tapes which is missing, Nick says, "If it's good enough for Nixon, it's good enough for us."
• There are four model plane technicians credited at the end of the show.

275. Clash of Shadows
Original air date: 3/8/80 -- Opening Credits -- End Credits

In this show, both McGarrett and Nazi war criminal hunter Yuri Bloch (George Ralph DiCenzo) track down Nazi "death camp butcher" and "leader of youth" Emil Klaus, who's living in Hawaii surrounded by an entourage of blond-haired young men. Albert Paulsen plays Klaus (a.k.a. Adrian Cassell), looking somewhat emaciated and very much older than his appearance in season two's Just Lucky, I Guess. The show is seriously sabotaged by Paulsen's laughable accent and William Smith's performance as Kimo. At one point when McGarrett flashes on the "final solution" (no pun intended), saying excitedly "Wow! I think I see a pattern emerging," all Kimo can come up with is a totally disinterested "I'm glad you do, Steve." When Kimo checks out Bloch's hotel room, not only does he not have a warrant (he just breaks into the room), but he picks up various items while looking through the room and throws them on the floor. There are a lot of questions: If Yuri Bloch is so famous, why does Anne Chernus (Elaine Giftos), in charge of a local safe house, not recognize him when he shows up at her door badly wounded? (Bloch takes on the identity of another Nazi-hunter named Joel when the two of them are shot at and Joel killed at the beginning of the show.) When Anne goes to Bloch's hotel and picks up his mail, why doesn't the clerk say anything? This is after Kimo checks out Bloch's room in the hotel, gets punched out and follows one of Klaus's blond boys down the fire escape. Surely the hotel would suspect something fishy with this guest. Does Klaus's German-accented cohort Christine Martin really work unnoticed in the foreign transactions department of the First Security Bank of Oahu for three years with the intention of safeguarding his interests? When McGarrett comes to visit Klaus near the end of the show, he somehow knows that inside a copy of a book in Klaus's militaria collection, "Battles That Have Changed the Course of History," there is a copy of Klaus's "master plan." There is no explanation as to how McGarrett knows this! When Klaus catches McGarrett snooping in this book, suddenly Bloch appears out of nowhere with Lou Richards as another Israeli agent, and there is a lot of exposition which further derails the show. After this, as some of the Klaus-jugend arriving to join his entourage are busted at the airport (the charge is travelling with false passports), McGarrett in a smart-ass way yells at them from his car: "Auf wiedersehn, kamaraden!" ("Farewell, comrades!"). Lloyd Bochner, who appeared in #271, School For Assassins, makes an appearance as an Israeli government bigshot, looking like The Wolfman with his beard much darker in color than the hair on his head. The music by Duane Tatro has some modern-sounding moments, including funk electric bass passages, but overall it is kind of dull. The eleventh season show about Nazis, A Distant Thunder, was much better than this one.

MORE TRIVIA:

• McGarrett quote to Carew: "I want every bill, receipt or slip of paper you can find [in a military memorabilia shop that was burned to the ground], charred or not charred." It's later determined that the owner of the shop, who was murdered, had some chemical named "paralithium" (a term later used on Star Trek) in his system. This bogus chemical, which paralyzes the victim, was reportedly used by the Germans during World War II.
• The other books in Klaus's library in addition to the "Battles" book mentioned above are Ridpath's History of the World, The Battle of Hastings and Corpus Juris.
• How does Anne know that McGarrett is on the case (as she tells Bloch/Joel)? The way the Governor explained things to McGarrett sounds like he wanted to keep this case out of the papers, emphasizing that McGarrett had to be a "diplomat" as well as a cop.
• The bank manager in this episode, played by Daniel Taba, is named Mohai, the same name as Tommy Fujiwara's character in the previous episode.
• During the show, Klaus and his followers are in the process of moving to South Africa (how appropriate, for the times). One wonders why the boys who show up at the airport at the end just don't go directly there instead of to Hawaii.
• Two of the pre-commercial waves are preceded by shots of toy soldiers.
• When McGarrett is seen speaking to Carew briefly in the teaser, the audio is mostly the same later in McGarrett's office, but the video is different. McGarrett's hair looks like a Julius Caesar cut in the teaser.
• Fred Ball appears uncredited as a computer analyst working for the Israeli government.
• When Bloch/Joel arrives at Anne's place, the code word exchanged between the two of them includes the expression "Masada," the name of a site in Israel where Jewish extremists fought with Roman soldiers a couple of thousand years ago, a battle which ended in a mass suicide by the Jews.
• Bloch was staying in room 411 of the Makani Kai Hotel, located at 129 Paoakalani Street. This is currently occupied by a place called the Hotel Renew.
• When Winston Char as Harry the coroner tries to delay Israeli agent Lou Richards, he is beaten up for his trouble. Harry later says that he "picked a nice peaceful profession."
• McGarrett is pretty laid back throughout the show, analyzing things and having brainstorms. When he suddenly starts yelling at one of Klaus's blonde underlings during the big confrontation at the end, his level of anger is surprising by comparison. As the show wraps up, McGarrett tells Kimo to "book them."

276. A Bird in Hand... [NO STARS!]
Original air date: 3/15/80 -- Opening Credits -- End Credits

An unbearably stupid show -- my nomination for worst Five-O episode of all. This episode should be required viewing for TV production classes in how not to make a show from the angles of writing, producing, directing and acting, among others. The show starts out with a bus from Honolulu Island Tours on a bird watching expedition driving through some sugar cane fields. The passengers on the bus include rock singer Marty Watts (Randy Ruff) and his wife Julie Mae (Sylvia Clinger), Angie Walker (Lara Parker), a newspaper reporter/photographer for the Star Press covering their honeymoon, surfer/swimmer Johnny Salomao (Paul Dennis Martin), Professor Hatari (the bald Seth Sakai) and a middle-aged couple from Kansas, all of whom are rumoured to be members of the Audubon Society. When the bus breaks down with a flat tire and it is being repaired, the passengers take pictures of an abandoned sugar mill nearby. Why they do this is strange, because it doesn't seem to be even remotely interesting. Outside the mill, the hyper-paranoid Howard Hughes-like "con artist of the century" Anthony del Vecchi (John Dehner) is relaxing on a chaise. Inside the mill, his associates and a bunch of hired hands are filling pineapple cans with gold bullion that has been melted down and formed into pineapple-like rings to be spirited out of the country. According to McGarrett later, del Vecchi fleeced investors out of more than $100 million -- I guess he was sort of the Bernie Madoff of his day. You seriously have to wonder why is Del Vecchi outside the mill in the first place if he is so concerned about his operation being uncovered? His associates give new meaning to the term "ubiquitous" -- they know more about what is going on than Five-O usually does. They not only manage to get to the tour bus company's drop-off point before the bus arrives back there, but also park themselves on a nearby yacht to take pictures of the passengers so they can track them down. Later, at her apartment, Angie is drying her hair (though it doesn't seem wet) and discovers that her apartment has been broken into. Considering there is a huge hole that has been cut in the glass patio door beside the lock, why does she then bother to lock the door after she closes it? Rather than calling the cops, instead, she opens up her closet (one would suspect she is familiar with what's inside) and freaks when the ironing board falls out. Shortly after this, she hears on the radio that Marty and his wife -- who were last seen going to a rehearsal for a concert at Maluhia Park -- were found dead 10 minutes before after their car plunged into a canyon. When her editor Tom Gordon (Angus Duncan) calls to tell her this news a few seconds later, he informs her that the driver of the bus was also found dead with a broken neck at the Shrine Hall. Why doesn't she tell Tom that her apartment was broken into? Flashing on some picture that she took a while back of McGarrett, Angie visits Five-O to express her concerns. Kimo and her then head to Marty's accident scene, where the German-accented member of del Vecchi's Team Ubiquitous, Klieber (George Fisher) is seen snooping around. When they finish, the two of them drive away, and a large semi-trailer truck driven by del Vecchi's burly thug Santos (Edward Vierra) pursues them in a scene reminiscent of the Stephen Spielberg TV movie Duel (1971). When the truck forces them off the road, the perspective behind them is totally wrong in one shot (the protective fence is on the left, rather than the right) and at the end, the car is nowhere near the edge of the cliff, despite a closeup from below which shows it just about falling over. McGarrett figures he can get a list of the passengers on the tour bus, all of whom are determined to be in serious danger, but when he arrives at the tour bus company's office, he finds it is burned down because of a "lighter fluid bomb." He quizzes Professor Hatari at his vandalized university office about Salomao, the student on the bus, and the professor wonders "Who would steal flammulated owls and ruddy ducks?," referring to his collection of stuffed birds. The scene switches to a beach where Salomao is seen surfing as his very attractive girl friend watches. But he disappears, and she finds him washed up at the top of the water line instead of floating in the surf. Santos is seen coming out of the water nearby, having somehow knocked Salomao off. Kimo visits the sugar factory pretending to be a building inspector so he can snoop around, a particularly dumb move considering he might run into Santos who was driving the truck that tried to kill him. Fortunately, Santos is not there. Instead, he is hiding in the back seat of Angie's car (license number 3F-1342), where he grabs her and forces her to drive back to the sugar mill. Why doesn't she see him? The car, which looks like a Toyota, isn't that big! When del Vecchi realizes Five-O is hot on his trail, he decides instead of sending the bullion in pineapple cans via freighter, to send it by air instead. A look at one of the labels shows that it is going to D.V. (as in del Vecchi) Enterprises, Via del Parajes, Los Quinteros, Paraguay. Considering how secretive this guy is, why would he give a major clue to the cases' destination like this? Another "DUH" moment. One has to wonder why Del Vecchi just pays off the local workers who were helping put the gold in pineapple cans --- wouldn't he kill them instead, especially since he ordered his men to wipe out all the bus passengers, who were hardly as big a threat to him? McGarrett and Kimo soon arrive at the sugar mill, and McGarrett -- not taking any risks -- tells Kimo to grab one of the cases in the pineapple warehouse so he can examine one of the cans by opening it with a can opener. Then he tells Kimo to rescue the kidnapped Angie from the grasp of Santos. (When Angie bites Santos, trying to escape, he belts her in the face.) Interestingly, Kimo gives instructions to McGarrett using Santos' walkie-talkie, which Del Vecchi surely could hear. When Del Vecchi falls off the balcony near the end, freaking out because McGarrett is driving away with his booty, Kimo says "he's dead" almost immediately. Horrible, horrible banalities at the end, with McGarrett reading a poem which goes on for almost a minute. He starts by saying "When I was a boy, my father used to give us a penny a line to learn poetry." Terrible! (This actually happened in Jack Lord's real life, according to one article I read.) Kimo and Angie walking beside him are at a loss for words. The acting by Kimo and Truck in this episode is zombie-like. The end is near...

MORE TRIVIA:

• Five-O (or anything other than the bird watchers) doesn't appear until 13:13 into the show.
• The tour bus advertises "Beaches - Volcanoes - Birds" on its side.
• Angie's gasps as she and McGarrett discover that the film of the pictures she took of the sugar mill have been exposed are too much. She suddenly realizes that she had a 110 camera that was not in her bag (the supposedly thorough guys who broke into her apartment conveniently overlooked this). It has some pictures of the mill on it. Despite the fact that 110 film quality is nowhere near as sharp as that of 35mm film, bogus blowup techniques are used to get a closeup of del Vecchi from one of the 110 camera's photographs. I actually laughed out loud when I saw the results of this, which are crystal clear. Karen Rhodes points out in her book Booking Five-O that when Angie is taking the shots of the mill, we never see the 110 camera, only the 35mm one.
• The moronic writing at the beginning of the show is reminiscent of The Dukes of Hazzard.
• Check the top-heavy female fan getting autographs from the Marty near the beginning of the show. As well, the tan line on Salomao's girl friend suggests an ill-fitting costume.
• McGarrett wears a leisure suit. He estimates that each one of the gold rings rings being put into the pineapple cans weighs 2 ounces. At the rate of 6 ounces of gold in each can, if the total amount of gold was worth $100 million, this would have converted into 10416 pounds of gold, or approximately 5.2 tons. That would require about 27,777 cans. That is a lot of cans. At the rate of 24 cans of pineapple to a case, this means that they would have needed 1157 cases of pineapple to smuggle the gold, which is probably a lot more than are seen on the back of the pickup truck that is taking the cases to the airport.
• The score, which is by Ray, uses cues from earlier shows at approximately 23:00 and 39:08 on the DVD.

277. The Moroville Covenant
Original air date: 3/29/80 -- Opening Credits -- End Credits

In this episode, Honolulu lawyer and up-and-coming Senatorial candidate David Lawrence (Paul Burke) has a secret dredged up from his past (not a particular shady secret by today's standards) which threatens to torpedo his career. Turns out that when he was younger, Lawrence accidentally mowed down his rich aunt with a car during a snowstorm in his hometown of Moroville, Idaho (a fictional burg), which gave him money via her will to pursue an expensive legal education at Stanford. His girl friend at the time, Eva Pritchard, took the blame for driving the car, something which has been covered up ever since. Pritchard's current husband Jack Smith (Christerpher Neddles) finds out about all of this, and suddenly appears in Hawaii to blackmail Lawrence for $100,000, but himself becomes the victim of foul play when a horse he is riding at the same range on Oahu as Lawrence falls over a cliff. (The explanation for how Smith died is very far-fetched. Both he and the horse were doped up -- the horse with amphetamines, himself with chloral hydrate -- and it is assumed that he was not able to control the horse. But there are big questions as to how he and the horse were administered these drugs, how he got to the riding range and what he was doing there in the first place.) The investigation into Smith's murder leads Five-O down several interesting alleys, most of them relating to people connected with Lawrence's Senate campaign. Sharon Farrell (who is very well-costumed) and William Smith both have lots of detective work to do in this episode, Lori in Honolulu, Kimo in Moroville, perhaps because this was actually the second twelfth season episode filmed. The final confrontation between Lawrence, Evie (Diane McBain), who, like her husband, shows up unexpectedly in Hawaii, and Margot, Lawrence's wife (Helen Funai), verges on being embarrassing. The music in this episode by James Di Pasquale (his only Five-O score), is really, really bad. Despite its glacial pace and being almost totally devoid of any typical Five-O action, the episode would have fared much better with a score which didn't mostly sound like easy listening music. The climactic build-up to the waves is super boring as well. There is no indication at the end as to whether Lawrence will 'fess up to the public over his scandalous past, which, according to the district attorney (an uncredited actor whose character is named "Paul") includes "withholding evidence."

MORE TRIVIA:

• The accident with the aunt took place in 1958, or 21 years before the show, according to a newspaper report that Kimo uncovers in Idaho. But Winnie Winston (Don Pomes), one of the men associated with Lawrence's re-election, refers to it as being both a "20-year-old indiscretion," and having taken place "24 years ago" when he is arrested and grilled by McGarrett. There is a big echo in the room during this interrogation.
• There are two jump cuts seen, at around 36:03 and 40:06 on the DVD (McGarrett and Pomes respectively), as if the actors made some mistake while delivering their lines and rather than do a retake, the errors were just snipped out.
• The car that the Lawrence was driving when he ran over his aunt was an Edsel ... what a sneaky way to mention Ford!
• Last Five-O appearance of Danny Kamekona, who appears as police lieutenant Akane, plus other members of the Five-O repertoire company: Neddels, Don Pomes, Carleton Smith and John Stalker.
• Check the closeup of the tire near the beginning ... you can see the WD-40 which one Five-O director said was used to help make the well-known squealing noise. (The license number on this car is 8E-271.)
• When Smith's body is found, there is a news report from KGMB's mobile unit. While this is a TV station, and the female news reporter seems to be talking to a TV camera, there is no camera seen, and Lori listens to the report on the radio in her car while she is driving.
• At the beginning of the show, McGarrett is seen trying to recruit Lawrence to speak at the police graduation luncheon. One wonders why he would do this -- isn't there a certain arms' distance between Five-O and HPD? After they leave Lawrence's office, Lori is standing, waiting for the two of them outside by the Mercury Marquis.
• Kimo quote: "That was really a good hunch Steve had about 'Jack Smith' being too obvious to be an alias." DUH! McGarrett quote: "Virtue is the only good and self-control the only means of achieving virtue," the latter a comment from Antisthenes, the ancient Greek founder of cynic philosophy (please!). Both Lori and Duke break up in laughter over this.
• Lawrence was born on June 29th, 1937. This is about 11 years after actor Burke's real birth date in 1926.

278. Woe to Wo Fat
Original air date: 4/5/80 -- Opening Credits -- End Credits

"We come now to the final act of this morality play." So says Wo Fat, prior to his kung-fu fighting confrontation with McGarrett at the end of this episode. Wo seems to have retired from being an active spy, instead having taken up residence on some tropical island where he flies kidnapped scientists to do his bidding working on the "ultimate missile deterrent system" ... which, of course, will not be used for peaceful purposes. McGarrett has himself disguised as Professor Elton Raintree, "the world's foremost theoretical physicist," to whom he bears an uncanny resemblance, a raspy throat from an operation notwithstanding. Directed by Barry Crane, who produced over 100 episodes of Mission Impossible and directed 15 episodes of that series, and who had mixed results directing Five-O (Let Death Do Us Part, The Sleeper (both stinkers) and Labyrinth (12th season show which is not so bad)), Woe to Wo Fat reduces everything to the level of a comic book, though it doesn't mess with our minds as much as Deadly Courier or Here Today, Gone Tonight. The hardest thing to swallow is McGarrett's getup as Raintree, though it is obvious that the former "evil, power hungry international criminal" Wo thinks something is amiss from the beginning when the kidnapped Raintree is brought to the island. Wo exposes his imprisoned scientists in their cars or in his house with "compliance ration," some kind of gas which makes them into blissful cult followers, totally overcoming their "will to resist." They never seem to come back to reality, whereas McGarrett manages to wake up the first night he is Wo's guest and shuts the vent the mind-numbing fumes are pouring from. McGarrett's Rambo-like blasting of Wo Fat's lab at the end is silly, though there is a great explosion afterwards. The final conflict between the two (obviously stuntmen when seen from several angles), complete with heavy-handed pronouncements from each, is also cartoonish, as is the final "booking" of Wo, complete with "striped pyjamas." In the best Five-O tradition, the show recycles two other actors from this season: Lyle Bettger (lawyer Dave DiMarco in Labyrinth) and Wayne Ward (Joan Carter's boyfriend Wayne Stan Thomas in Image of Fear). The absence of any other Five-O regulars, especially the Governor and Duke, is very disappointing. Morton Stevens provides an outstanding score for this show, one of its highlights. This is a show that you will either like or hate. I liked it a lot more when viewing it this time than the last, probably because the quality of the print on the DVDs is so much better than the wretched TV print that I had before.

MORE TRIVIA:

• The final cast credit is Jack Lord as Prof. Raintree. DUH!
• As viewed from the air from what looks like a Lear Jet, there doesn't seem to be a landing strip on Wo Fat's island hideaway.
• There are echoes of Stevens' score to How to Steal a Masterpiece. The Five-O theme doesn't appear except at the end of the show.
• Wo's "prison" number is 9869. The uniform he is wearing went out of style in the very early twentieth century, though it did appear in chain gang movies after this.
• When Wo's mini-army comes after McGarrett who is trashing the laboratory with guns, why do they come across a field (which takes more time) rather than come up the same road that the scientists use when they arrive there from Wo's house?
• At the end, McGarrett is wearing a jeans outfit. Where did this getup come from? Raintree was kidnapped when on his way to the airport. It's unlikely that Wo would have supplied such a distinguished scholar with such an outfit.
• When McGarrett is running away from Wo at the end, he runs past trees where puffs of smoke come out from each side of the tree. This shot looks like it is repeated, but the second time, the puffs of smoke come out opposite sides of the trees.
• Bernard Ching is seen briefly, uncredited, as Wo's communication officer. Reggie Ho appears briefly at the beginning as a taxi driver in Singapore, speaking some gibberish which sounds half-Japanese when his fare, one of the scientists, is taken away by Wo's henchman.

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