Hawaii Five-0 208 Lapa’au Recap

This episode begins with two guys getting some hang time in the ocean. They are nearly killed when a plane crash lands into the water. The pilot Monica, was an immigration and customs (ICE) agent and was dead when it crashed.

At the scene Lori introduces the team to Jeff Morrison, Monica’s supervisor. He and Lori use to work together on a Federal Task Force. Jeff is concerned about foul play because Monica was not scheduled to fly. Max determines that she was poisoned (Pufferfish) and her death was 8 hours prior. Steve knows from the plane type and its fuel capacity that she had to have been dead many hours before that plane took off. She had been killed, loaded in the plane, and the pilot jumped leaving the plane to crash and hopefully cover up any evidence.

The team goes to Monica’s home to look for her Red Book, which has extensive notes about what she was working on. They enter and Danny takes an immediate liking to her dog and ends up bringing it back to headquarters and on the job with him. They find the book but it has pages missing, which Lori knows that an ICE agent would not do. They figure that maybe her killer broke in and stole the pages. They also find her camera and they analyze some surveillance photos the agent took. They ID a man who appears in many of them, Leo Miller. They speak with Leo and he insists that he is only a recovering cancer patient was trying to help her nail a local smoke shop that sells medicinal marijuana and isn’t picky about whether or not you have a marijuana card. Kono and Chin Ho go undecover to explore that angle but it ends up being a dead end.

Lori finds a new lead named Jason who left a print on the Red Book. He also makes an appearance in the smoke shop surveillance video. Jason runs from the 5-0 team when they try to question him, making Steve have to go all commando to bring him down. Turns out he didn’t want to be caught with a bag full of drugs. He insists that he only makes deliveries for clients but has no special knowledge of the content. He admits that he was an informant for Monica and that he tipped her off to an area of the customs house that had some hot activity. When he found out she was dead he broke into her home and stole the pages from her Red Book so that he would not be outed as a snitch.

The team gets info from the plane’s black box and Steve’s theory about a pilot bailing out proves correct. Lori pinpoints the area in which he would have jumped but it is very dense so Steve asks her and Chin Ho to grab some quads, traverse the jungle, and find the location where the killer jumped/landed. They find an abandoned parachute still hanging from a tree and motorcycle tire tracks leaving the area. Chin Ho can tell from the tracks that it was an old Triumph motorcycle.

The rest of the team checks out the building that the snitch led Monica to and they find an illegal animal poaching operation. They find animals and exotic ingredients like pufferfish poison and bear bile… which is used in alternative healing. Max tips them off to the fact that Jason’s confiscated bag had some pills with shark cartilage which leads them to Chinatown and an alternative medicine and herb shop. The doctor who runs the place is gone and when they see signs of a struggle and lots of blood they know it was foul play.

Chin Ho puts the pieces together for them when he finds that Leo Miller, the cancer patient that Monica photographed, was an owner of an old triumph motorcycle, like the one the killer used to get away. The guy is a pilot and an experienced jumper. Since he also has cancer he is a likely user of rare Chinese medicine and herbs. The team enters his home and waits for him to come home. When they ambush him he finally admits to killing Monica and also kidnapping the Chinese doctor. He was a patient of the doctor and had been convinced that the medicine was healing him. When the ICE agent threatened to shut the operation down and keep him from the medicine he needed, he killed her. Afterwards he found out his cancer had spread and decided to teach the good doctor a lesson by loading him up on Chemo drugs until he died. He tells the 5-0 team where he hid the man and they find him in the nick of time.

Danny ends up giving the dog to his daughter and the dead ICE agent receives the Medal of Valor for her service.

Best parts of the episode would have to be the dog riding shotgun while Steve sat in the back of the car, when he finds out the dog took a dump in his office, and when Max and Jeff try to determine if they know each other from somewhere else (ala Heroes), funny stuff.