Hawaii Five 0 episode 7.24 was another good episode for season 7. This time it revolved around Steve’s story including his SEAL days, and exemplified how the way you treat others one way or another really does matter. Thankfully in this case Steve’s actions were of kindness and thus kindness was returned ten-fold.
Linda and Manu review the episode in their own unique manner below so check it out. We added the gifs to make their words come more alive and the Alex only section just…well the reason is obvious.
Emanuela (Manu) Pari
Aloooha fellow Five 0 fans and welcome back for another discussion about our favourite show 🙂
And once again I have to say a very good episode with lots of things to like and even more to love.
One of those episodes that reminds us that Hawaii Five 0 is a great ensemble of amazing characters that we have come to love in the past 7 years but that one of them is the heart and soul of the show, the foundation stone for the task force to build on and an inspiration for everybody not only in the fictional universe of the show but also in real life.
I am of course talking about Steve McGarrett. Being a huge Alex O’Loughlin fan I have been accused many times to be biased about his talent and skills, and about the character he plays on the screen, but I have never let that affect my beliefs and my feelings towards him.
Alex plays Steve McGarrett with such integrity and honesty that sometimes I struggle to see the difference between the two. And most of it is probably because Alex shares a lot of Steve’s moral values and commitment towards making the world a better place not only with words but mostly leading by example and 7.24 is one of those milestones for the character that shows us the real essence of Steve McGarrett.
Steve McGarrett is not only an action hero, he is a hero in every sense of word.
But enough with me gushing and digressing, lets explain why I think what I wrote.
Most of the episode turns around an alleged, which turns out to be more than real, terror threat on Oahu.
Steve is summoned to Guantanamo Bay to talk to a prisoner which claims to have important information that he will reveal only to the Commander. The encounter between the two is initially awkward, with Salaam telling McGarrett that 10 years have passed kindly for him judging from his looks (the guy clearly doesn’t know much about the events in Steve’s life) and remembering that he has family on Oahu. Steve reveals that sadly his father passed but yes, he still has Ohana on the island, of course he is talking about his colleagues and friends of Five 0 and his girlfriend Lynn. Salaam warns Steve about something really bad supposed to happen soon in Oahu.
When The Commander returns to H.Q. to discuss the case he encounters a strong, and in some ways unusual, resistance from his team about believing the intel provided by Salaam. Clearly they have no idea why Steve is so inclined to trust the guy.
In reality Steve has his doubts about it but, aware of the bond he has formed with Salaam in 2007, decides to follow his heart, and instincts and investigate.
We get to see how the relationship between the two men starts and develops via numerous flash backs in the course of the episode, each one gives us a better understanding of why Steve decides to trust Salaam and of why Salaam feels the need to repay this debt of gratitude towards the man that treated him with dignity when all others only saw him as the enemy with the only use of extracting information from.
First we see Steve allowing Salaam to respect his faith and pray to his God. A meaningful gesture indeed as so many times religion and faith are used as excuses for hate and war. The first positive connection is established.
Then The Commander provides a hot meal to the prisoner, even apologising for it not being Halal, according to the Islamic tradition. Steve gets in trouble with one of the C.I.A. officers for this kindness, the guy was obviously expecting more torture and duress from McGarrett to induce the prisoner to talk but Steve doesn’t bulge and continues with his different interrogation technique. He likes doing things his own way.
In the meantime, in present days Lou and Kono work on a lead provided by Jerry concerning a suspicious travel agency and find out that the shop is just a front for moving money. This also puts Five 0 on the track of a history professor, naturalised American citizen but of Middle East origin that has left a video explaining that the terror act, which at that point hasn’t yet happened, is consequence of the barbaric way the US Government and military dealt with a specific situation in Afghanistan.
Once again Steve shows his superior investigative skills deducing, just from watching the facial expression of the Professor on the video, that it was all a set up, the guy was being used by someone else as a scapegoat.
In the meantime, thanks to a burner phone bought with Kalid’s credit card, Five 0 manages to find one of the perpetrators who tries to escape with a motorbike but ends up being killed in a quite gruesome collision with two different cars.
They eventually work out that the target of the terror threat is not a building but a plane coming in from the mainland and carrying the body of a marine involved in the Afghanistan incident mentioned in Kalid’s video.
Spider-Steve climbs the building and engages in combat with one of the terrorists, ending up shooting him, in what I thought was the second gruesome scene of the episode, with a bazooka.
On top of the main story the episode also introduced us to a topic that will surely come back in the final episode and might even affect Season 8.
Robert Coughlin invites Chin to a meeting in which he offers him a job to run a similar task force to Five 0 in San Francisco, as the triads are apparently running out of control and a team with (limited) means and immunity has become necessary. Quite funny to remember that this was the exact excuse used to introduce Abby to the Five 0 team in Season 6. Despite revealing the difficult crime situation in the Bay Area Coughlin tries to persuade Chin that is still is a great place to raise a family and that him, Abby and Sarah would be happy there. Go figure…
Chin confides in Steve at the end of the episode and the Commander reveals that Coughlin had already paid him the professional courtesy of asking before. Chin and Steve agree that it is a very good job opportunity but Chin confesses that he is not willing to make a final decision before knowing exactly where he stands with Abby, leading us to believe that he has every intention of proposing some time soon. We know that Abby will be in the final episode so hopefully we’ll be witness to a romantic scene between the two, or at least I hope so as we haven’t seen the couple together since the first episode of Season 7.
Selfishly speaking I hope Chin will say no to the transfer. Five 0 is very much the Ohana that was started in Season 1 and loosing Max this Season was already hard. The idea of loosing an inspiring and charming character as Chin is very depressing.
The third and last story-line was the one of Hirsh meeting with Kono and Adam in order to talk about his intention of expanding his business, which no bank on the island seem to want to consider. Hirsh was not particularly thrilled about Adam’s presence, which he freely describes are “not business competition” but we all know he considers a love rival concerning Kono. Kono doesn’t make things easier for poor Gerard refusing to expunge his criminal record or kissing her husband right in front of him.
Despite not being the best of friends Adam and Hirsh not only share the love for Kono but also the difficulty of finding a job for being ex cons so Adam helps Hirsh in improving his business plan and ends up accidentally involving Kamekona who offers to become Gerard’s “silent” partner. Even if unwilling to receive a hug from him Kamekona is also sympathetic towards Hirsh’s situation having been himself an ex con in need of a job and having been able to succeed also thanks to Five 0’s help.
Once again in this episode we are reminded that kindness leads to more kindness and positive outcomes and that gratitude is the best way to go.
Unfortunately as it often happens the end of the episode quite disturbingly reveals, thanks to a telephone call from Steve’s old friend Joe White, that the terrorists behind the attack of the day might actually just have started their mission and that they might be in fact part rogue faction of the US Government inclined towards domestic terrorism.
Fortunately we are offered another flash back of Steve and Salaam, that reminds us how much good there still is in the world. Salaam asks Steve why he is showing him all this kindness and Steve frankly says that they are both men, that they came into this world in the same way and that war like situations make this simple truth often too easy to forget. Thank you Commander for being the most inspiring hero.
Quite honestly one of the best episodes of the season, probably just with the only one fault of not explaining at all about Danny’s absence, unless I missed that, in which case I apologise.
And now we are left with the season finale next week, which promises to be exciting and action packed. Will we loose any of our favourites at the end of this season? The more likely candidates are either Chin or Kono as it has already been confirmed that Steve and Danno will both be in Season 8. Fingers crossed nobody will leave.
Linda Stein
There is one thing that always worries me after we have a really great H50 episode. I always worry that the follow up episode will be more of a breather type episode. Light on the action and, perhaps, not a very riveting story. I am thrilled to death that was not the case this week. To be perfectly honest, I really wasn’t expecting it to be anything but fantastic since we already knew it was going to be Steve centric with flashbacks to his SEAL days. How the hell could that not be fantastic? Also, with only this episode and one more to the end of the season, the odds that this episode would be fluff were extremely thin.
First off, we didn’t have a cold opening this week. Unlike most episodes, this one wasn’t about the team trying to solve a crime, it was about them trying to prevent one, so there was no crime or crime scene aftermath for us to see in a cold opening. I really love when they do this because it means we have no idea (even if we’ve read the synopsis beforehand) of what’s really going to happen next.
Ok…let’s get to it:
Flashbacks: I’m going to jump right in with this right off the bat because they were so damned good!
In these troubled times, it’s a good lesson to see that treating someone with kindness and respect is sometimes a much better way to achieve your objective than being hurtful and cruel. It’s obvious that Salaam has been tortured. Steve said he’d been water boarded and he was being denied both food and water as well as being physically attacked.
I was curious at first as to why Steve would walk into Salaam’s cell in a mask only to take it off right in front of him. But I soon realized the mask for was for the benefit of the guards outside. Steve wanted Salaam to know who the man was who was showing him compassion.
And, I loved how Steve stood up to the guy from the CIA who oversaw the interrogating of Salaam, loved how Steve got right up into his face about the way Salaam was being treated and his objections to Steve’s actions.
Originally in the Pilot script, there was a description of the McGarrett character. Here is the direct quote from that script:
“And now, a word about our hero: If you’d ask McGarrett’s Naval Instructors at Annapolis for a recommendation, they’d say he’s the best man for the job, only sometimes you don’t want the best man if he won’t listen to a word you say.”
Steve had a single mindedness about what he thought was the right way to do things, and a willingness to, within reason, buck authority when he felt it was wrong. The scene with the CIA guy perfectly illustrated this trait.
The CIA, overseeing that operation, technically, had authority over Steve. Steve was disobeying orders with what he was doing but didn’t care. He felt he was not only doing the right thing, but what would ultimately achieve their objective since it seemed going the traditional, harsh way wasn’t working that well.
We’ve gotten to see Steve as a SEAL a couple of times over the years and I think this will be one of my most favorite times. The scenes between Salaam, played by Omid Abtahi and Steve were incredible. Omid was a worthy screen mate for Alex. Each man a master at saying very little and yet conveying enormous amounts of story and emotion with just their eyes and facial expressions. They each spoke very little, but the understanding between them was strong. Steve’s open willingness to speak to Salaam, not as interrogator to prisoner, but man-to-man, wanting to show Salaam that not all men are hostile, not all men need to treat other men like animals. These scenes were beautiful to watch.
We, of course, know Steve has a heart as big as all outdoors. It’s nice to see that as a military man, he didn’t lose that or that it wasn’t something he found when he returned to Hawaii. It’s something he always had.
The Team: I liked how, even though we did have a minor secondary story this week, the entire team was working on this one case. I’m also really liking how they are using Jerry these days. Yeah, he still has the habit of throwing random conspiracy theories into conversations but he’s proving, over and over again, what a real asset he is to the team. I was never worried that getting a badge meant Jerry would be heading out to the field but it’s still nice to see he’s doing the things he does best for the team.
Figuring out that Salaam’s tip about “Cain Allah” wasn’t Islamic or Arabic but a mispronunciation of Hawaiian “Kane Ala” meaning “the way of the sky” (along with Steve’s help) was inspired.
Something that really caught my eye this week was the way the team reacted when Steve told them about his trip to Gitmo and the tip he’d gotten. Even without Danny there, the entire team gave Steve a hard time over the intel Salaam gave him.
They were all questioning his trust in what the man said, all questioning whether it was a real treat or a set up. I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen the entire team go up against Steve that way.
But then I remembered the way Steve went up against that CIA guy. The way that original McGarrett description was written over seven years ago and, I don’t know, maybe that’s one of the reasons why Steve doesn’t seem to have that big of a problem with Danny doing the same thing and with the team doing it here. Maybe that’s why, even if the delivery isn’t always ideal, Steve respects that they don’t just blindly follow orders but have the intelligence and trust in their own abilities to question things, to throw out their own opinions. Steve recognizes in Danny and the team, the same traits he himself displayed when needed.
Of course, Steve was right in this case. Well, he’s always right, but I liked that the rest of the team were ranged together, voicing their worries and their doubts even if ultimately, they followed Steve like always. Steve would have done the same thing. If the CIA guy had reported him to his superiors and Steve was ordered to back off of what he was doing with Salaam, he would have done so.
Crime of the week: Like I said before, we really didn’t have a crime of the week, because an actual crime hadn’t happened. But it was fascinating watching the team, and especially Steve, work through all the angles because, of course, this is H50 so nothing is ever straight forward.
Everyone had a hand in solving this one. We’ve already mentioned Jerry’s contribution and I always love it when Kono and Lou team up. Lou’s take down of the boss at the travel agency was classic.
It was also Lou who figured out the target was a plane whose flight path was over the suspected target building. Everyone is on shocked high alert when Chin identifies the plane as one carrying not only innocent civilians but the body of a fallen Marine and many members of his unit.
But the absolute best was, of course, Steve. Honestly, Alex absolutely owned this episode. Thanks to intel found by Lou and Kono at the travel agency, the team narrows its investigation to a man named Adnan Khalid, a naturalized citizen and Associate Professor at Oahu State. When they raid his house, they find a laptop with a recorded message intended to be viewed after he has carried out his terroristic plan.
I was absolutely riveted to the screen as I watched Steve’s eyes as he viewed the message. Listen, watch, concentrate, rewind. Listen, watch, concentrate, rewind. Listen, watch, rewind. Watch, rewind.
It was mesmerizing. Steve ability to ascertain that their terror suspect had been coerced into making that take showed what an astonishing detective he is and makes you wonder just how many of those types of videos he had to watch in his years as a SEAL and in Naval Intelligence.
The end of the episode proved to be the most chilling moment of all. We got an actual Joe White mention and the news that the terrorists Five-0 took out might have only been at the start of their Jihad. They also could be part of a faction of the US Government. I don’t really understand why the US Government would want to promote domestic terrorism but the idea is positively chilling.
Usually, everyone would be thrilled they were able to take out all the bad guys, but unfortunately, with all these terrorists dead there’s no way to flip them on what else could be down the line. Since we already know the finale next week is a continuation of the human trafficking story, I doubt we’re going to find out what’s going on with this. Unless, of course, they throw in something at the very last minute to tie this story into whatever’s going to happen in the Season 8 premiere. Either way, it all looks damn exciting.
Hirsch and Adam: I’m torn over this little story. On the one hand, it really wasn’t necessary and it would have been nice if the time spent on it could have been used on the main story. But, on the other hand, I kind of liked this little breather in what was otherwise a very intense episode. I also liked it because it didn’t interfere with the main story, meaning, no main character was pulled away to be part of it.
I like Hirsch and I love Adam so this story was kind of cute. But, I will admit that Hirsch really….really… needs to stop his Kono obsession now. It was cute, barely, in the beginning but to keep doing it, to keep talking about it and talking about it to Adam, of all people. Just.. guys… no! I have no problem with Adam helping the guy out and I know Kono views him as some sort of harmless puppy, but enough now. Time for adult conversation and to be done with the adolescent puppy love.
The story itself was sort of sweet and I really loved how Kamekona came to Hirsch’s financial rescue. I enjoyed the tie in with Kame’s own story and how he pulled himself out of the disgrace of being an ex-con to build himself a flourishing business. The concept of “paying it forward” was touching. It was also a nice tie in with the flashbacks. One man showing kindness to another when he really didn’t have to.
Stunts: After six and a half years of fantastic, Emmy nominated work on H50, stunt coordinator Jeff Cadiente recently moved on to other projects. I must admit, I was kind of worried that the fantastic stunts we’ve come to expect in our show would suffer in Jeff’s absence. That it just wouldn’t be the same. Well, they’re not the same, that’s for sure. Is it just me or are the stunts, car chases, fight scenes, etc. getting more brutal than ever? Our new Stunt Coordinator, Eric Norris, doesn’t do anything by halves, that’s for damn sure.
I’ve openly gasped several times over the last couple of episodes over things unfolding before me and this episode was no exception. Watching that guy flee on his motorcycle, only to crash into a car, flip over the hood and be brutally run over by another car left me shaking.
But I literally jumped out of my skin when Steve picked up that rocket launcher on the roof. I seriously said, out loud to the TV, “OH NO…. HE ISN’T” …. then…….. Dear God, I never expected that!
I really miss Jeff’s presence in BTS photos and the wonderful inside peeks he gave us of filming and life on set. His hard work, immense talent and dedication is a major reason why our show has experienced the success it has. But, as we all know, things in life change and people must eventually move on. But, I’m really glad we got Eric to take his place. His stunts may be a bit jarring and take a bit of getting used to but I can’t deny they sure do add a new and different level of excitement to the show. Not better… not worse…. just wonderfully different.
SuperSEAL: Of course you just know I have to mention the fact that Steve got the crap beat out of him again this week. But at least this time, when it was all over, he actually looked like he’d been in a fight. No sissy little cut over one eye this time. This time he looked really bad. Kudo’s to the make-up department this week.
And then there was that Spider-Man routine at the office building. Kono and Lou and taking care of the gunman down below but, unfortunately, those same gunmen are blocking access to the roof. Well, you know that’s not going to stop our SuperSEAL. I don’t think I’ve said “oh my God” more often in one episode as I did in this one. “Oh my God, what’s he going to do, scale the building?” Yes that is exactly what he’s going to do. All I kept hearing the entire time in my head was Danny’s voice “What the HELL is the matter with you?!?!” LOL
Will Chin move to San Francisco?: Ok…where the hell did that come from? Coughlin, who hired Abby to try to bring down Five-0 because he didn’t like their cowboy ways of doing things and because he had a vendetta against Chin, now decides that he wants a task force just like them for San Francisco. And he wants Chin to run it. It’s so bad there, the Triads have taken over the streets, they need a task force to handle all the crime but, hey, San Francisco is a great place to raise kids. Seriously?
But, of course, next week is the finale and everyone needs something “final” to dangle over the summer. The synopsis for the finale is that Abby and Chin have a decision to make. Maybe it’s not just one decision they’re talking about.
When Steve asked Chin how Abby felt about a possible move back to San Francisco, Chin said he hadn’t told her yet, that he was waiting to ask until he’d made things between them “official”. So, Chin is going to ask Abby to marry him. Will Abby decide to accept Chin’s proposal? If she does, will Chin decide he wants the San Francisco job? Will Abby want to go back to San Francisco? What if Chin decides he’d rather stay in Hawaii? Will Abby support that? What about Sarah? She’s just beginning to settle in to her new home, with her new family, with the entire Ohana. Will Chin want to uproot her, yet again? So yeah, there is more than just one decision to be made here.
Personally, I don’t think there is any way Chin is leaving Hawaii. I don’t know of course, but my gut feeling is that Abby will say yes, and they will decide together that, even though the job in San Francisco is a wonderful opportunity, they want to raise Sarah in Hawaii and stay surrounded by their friends and family. At least, I really hope that’s what happens.
Well, that’s it for this week my friends. Next week is the Season 7 finale. I can’t believe another year has flown by. Season 7 has been one of the best seasons of the show ever. One more great episode to go and, judging by the BTS videos and photos we’ve seen along with the promo and the synopsis, this finale looks like one for the ages! As much as I don’t want this season to end, I really can’t wait to see how it all wraps up and sets us up for Season 8.
Alex Only
Here are the Alex/Steve only gifs of the week. This episode produced some good moments to take a look at.
Only one more to go and it is only a few days away. Although it is something to look forward to in order to see the continual story and what is next for the team, it is also a little hard to face the four months ahead with no new episodes. Thankfully it does come at the time of year where we are all busy and outside taking part in our own adventures!
See you here next week for the final Different Points of View for the season as we wrap it all up.
