Hawaii Five 0 episode 8.17 Holapu ke ahi, koe iho ka lehu Recap

 

Hawaii Five 0 was back again last night for the second week in a row and this episode was full of team work to make right an accidental wrong that Adam caused when he had overstepped. It was nice to see how Steve supported Adam after he had not looped him in on something that seemed to be important for Steve to have known about upfront. The action and comedy were back, so lets take a look at the recap to see just what went down.  This one was done By Stella who is also a new recap contributor, so thank you to her. Talented new blood is always welcome.

 

The episode opens with two masked figures breaking into a storage and stealing yellow tanks of chlorine. They’re quick and effective and the security guard who tries to stop them ends up being disarmed and neutralized in seconds. The tanks are loaded into a truck and they leave the facility without any of the other security guards being able to stop or follow them. As they’re driving away and they pull off their masks, we realize it’s Adam and Jesse, so we start to wonder what’s going on.

 

 

Back from the opening credits, we hear an alarm blaring and see the team converge into the “Blue Room” and Steve checking the time to see how long it’s taking them. Jerry, being the thoughtful guy that he is, has brought a “bug-out six-person doomsday survival pack” with everyone’s favorites. But someone’s still missing.

 

 

When Danny finally shows up, casually strolling into the room, coffee in hand, Steve is not pleased, and points out that Danny’s not taking the mandatory drill for a nuclear attack seriously. To which Danny, in true Williams fashion, replies that if it was the real deal they would be dead already because the room wouldn’t withstand a nuclear attack. The whole scene is hilarious, with the team (Eddie included) discussing being stuck together for the rest of their lives and having to repopulate the Earth in case they’re the only survivors. They eventually agree that nuke death sounds more appealing – unsurprisingly, all but Steve and Jerry. 

Note: This episode was actually written before the false missile threat  report that occurred in Hawaii in the middle of January. So ironic.

 

 

When the drill is over we find Steve and Danny entering HQ while discussing the restaurant. Steve has looked at the books, because the business is his job, and is worried about Uncle Vito’s involvement in the restaurant. He recaps the situation for Danny, reminding him that the man has blown half their design budget for a pornographic statue and was arrested for bribing the liquor commissioner. Danny, whose job is the kitchen and everything food-related, tries to reassure him saying that Vito may not work how Steve would work but he gets things done, and promises Steve a plate of agnolotti on opening night. Italian cuisine is not the Commander’s forte, and replies that he doesn’t eat veal (again, not surprising), to which of course Danny points out that he should know what agnolotti are because they’re opening an Italian restaurant. If they open it, Steve responds.

 

 

At that point, Steve notices Adam sitting in his office and asks if everything’s alright. It’s not. Not in the slightest. Adam with his face still showing the signs of last week’s ordeal, shows Steve the newspaper and the article about the robbery at the chemical plant. He explains that it was him and Jessie. Steve is surprised but keeps listening as Adam tells him that Hideki has moved into meth production, for which chlorine gas is a key ingredient, and needed to restock. Adam went with Jessie to watch her back, and discovered that one of Hideki’s soldiers, a Kazuya Nemoto, sold a couple of tanks to someone else who’s not in the meth business.

 

 

This news makes all alarm bells sound off in Steve’s head. Chlorine gas can also be used to make weapons of mass destruction, and he needs to inform the Governor while Adam fills in the team. The scene is very well acted on both parts: Steve wants to trust Adam and believe he’s made the right choice asking him for help but he’s also worried, and Adam desperately wants to please Steve and show him that he can be trusted but is also disappointed in himself for the screwup. 

 

 

In the next scene, we see HPD busting a meth lab and Adam sitting with Lou in the car, watching the scene. Lou is a wise man, and tries to tell Adam that it’s not his fault and that he couldn’t have known what was going to happen. He continues with the key to doing a good job is keeping your emotions in check and focus on the endgame, but that doesn’t make Adam feel any better.

 

 

Nemoto, one of the arrestees, is taken to the “Blue Room”and questioned by Lou and Tani, two of the more “affable members of the task force”. They service with a smile, and they have proof, so the guy eventually realizes that he’s screwed and reveals that he got another offer for those tanks. He doesn’t know the guy’s name, but he can tell them where he dropped off the chlorine. It is a house in Makiki. To some haoles, regular-guy types.

 

 

And we switch to those guys and witness them loading the tanks into the back of a van. Only something goes wrong while they move one, and gas starts hissing out of the tank. The man who was in the van desperately tries to shut it off but the others lock him inside the van to contain the leak and along with them, we all watch in horror as he starts to suffer the consequences of the exposure.

 

 

While Steve’s busy with the Governor, Danny leads the team to the house Nemoto indicated. They find the van and the guy, who’s still alive though gravely disfigured. Hazmat takes him to the hospital while the team finds out that both the house and the van were rented online and that neighbors noticed four guys coming in an out over the last few days. As the team is discussing if the guy’s gassing was intentional or not we see Danny walking away from the group. The whole thing probably is bringing back unpleasant memories of other deadly weapons and quarantine that he has been a part of.. Junior notices and follows him, asking him if he’s alright and reassuring him that they were not exposed and are perfectly safe. Danny doesn’t believe him and asks one of the techs, who confirms Junior’s word to Danny’s relief.

 

 

CSU finds four sets of prints in the house, and none of them are in the system. So what turns four regular guys into domestic terrorists? They left a computer behind, password-protected, that they give Jerry to crack because time is of the essence and there’s still another tank missing.

 

 

Adam and Junior are at the hospital. The gas victim’s name is Kevin Randall, a real estate agent in Waikiki with no priors, and he’s in a medical-induced coma because the gas also got into his lungs. He had his wallet and cell phone with him and the last call he made was to his wife, Denise. Probably calling to say goodbye, Danny points out.

 

 

Lou and Tani go to the Randalls’ house to talk to Denise. She was taking a nap, so her husband’s call went to voicemail. Urged by the seriousness of the situation, she listens to the message with tears in her eyes as her husband apologizes to her for screwing up and tells her he loves her and that she’s going to be fine. Denise wants to go to the hospital and be with her husband, but Lou and Tani tell her HPD will take her after they question her.

 

 

She admits it’s been a rough year as she’s been diagnosed with cancer nine months before and that Kevin’s been talking to an online support group for people with loved ones who have cancer. They’ve also been struggling with medical bills as they have no insurance.

 

 

When they leave the Randall home, Tani asks Lou if the whole thing could be a play for money: a group of guys meeting online, going through the same ordeal, and coming up with an extortion scheme. It may sound supervillain-y but at the Academy she’s been trained to consider every option, no matter how “cray-cray” it can be. “By Captain Keo, the guy who got her kicked out for punching him in the face”? Lou replies, but “hey, the advice to think outside the box was a good one”. They need to find the message board Kevin used to meet his accomplices but is there really time for that?

 

 

To speed things up they try to ask Randall’s doctor to bring him out of the coma so they can ask him some questions but the doctor refuses. It goes against hospital protocol and his duty to Randall as his doctor.

 

 

Thankfully Jerry’s also a master and manages to unlock the laptop, accessing the browser’s history. Randall has done research to see how much chlorine gas it would take to kill 200 people. Which is a very specific number, Danny points out, and a lot smaller than what they feared. He was apparently targeting a certain group of people, people they thought were responsible for what happened to Denise and others. The browser’s history also tells the team that they were planning to release the gas into a ventilation system, one manufactured in ’92 to be used in medium-sized office buildings. Jerry runs a search of all the building with a 200-people capacity and that ventilation system, and hundreds of results come up. Too many buildings, not enough time.

 

 

Steve comes back from his meeting with the Governor, which went just as horribly as he had feared, and goes into Danny’s office. Grover has looped him in about the case and where they are at but he asks how Adam is doing. Blaming himself, is Danny’s reply.

 

 

They’re interrupted by a phone call. It’s Jerry, who is standing seven feet from them at the smart table. He didn’t want to interrupt them by coming into the office since they looked pretty serious. You gotta appreciate the sentiment, though he is technically still interrupting them, as Danny says.

 

 

But it’s worth it. He found a cancer support group as a sub-page on Reddit and an anonymous user who posted on a regular basis and mentioned Denise’s name, age and symptoms. That has to be Kevin Randall, they decide. Everyone on the group has family members with the same illness, which confirms the theory that that’s how the four suspects met. Based on Jerry’s findings, the guys also talked about filing a class action lawsuit, and were talking about reaching out to a lawyer. They mentioned the lawyer by name, and they will not believe who it is.

 

 

It’s none other than Odell Martin, who has apparently started picking up clients after the Sang Min case, and got “a little law practice on the side”, but still dresses as a surfer. After pinging his cell phone, Lou and Tani find him in a library. Odell hasn’t lost his sense of humor and calls Tani “Five-0 next gen”, also noticing by the way she responds to a girl who asks them to “zip it” that McGarrett must’ve recruited her personally. That he did. And Tani responds “Yeah, babe, and this is a badge. You wanna see the gun?”

 

 

Odell tells them that Kevin and his friends wanted to sue Agrocore, a company that makes GMOs, biofuels and pesticides. They own a facility on the island that the four guys live by. They were convinced that the chemicals from the place found their way into the groundwater and caused cancer.

 

 

Steve calls, and Lou puts him on speaker. Agrocore has offices in five buildings, so Steve suggests calling the Governor and having her activate the nuclear emergency drill at all those locations to get everyone to safety without creating panic giving them time to search the buildings. Odell helps them narrow down the buildings by telling them Agrocore’s lead counsel’s name, Marshall Friedken, also known to him as ‘evil incarnate’. According to Martin, if there’s a villain in the story it’s this guy. Steve tells Jerry to prioritize the search to that location and have Adam and Junior meet them there.

 

 

Outside the building, the three remaining guys gather inside the van to go over their plan, but two of them have a change of heart and decide not to go through with it. It’s not the right way and they back out. That leaves the third member of the group, Doug Manning, who decides to handle the whole thing by himself.

 

 

The team storms Agrocore Plaza where Friedkens office is located, with beautiful camera work showing the members of Five-0 approaching the building. Steve gives instructions and takes Adam with him to the safe room where everyone’s gathered. He tells everyone that this is not a drill but a credible threat and asks where Marshall Friedken is. He learns that the man has been over at the corporate building all week in a meeting with the board of directors so they’re in the wrong building. 

 

 

Jerry says he’s trying to get Friedken on the phone but he’s not picking up, and Steve tells him to find anyone who works in that building and call them. The woman they reach says Friedken is on the ninth floor with someone who showed up to meet with him before the alert.

 

 

Driving Danny’s Camaro, Steve and Adam get to the Agrocore Corporate building and start searching the offices until they hear Friedken’s voice yelling “Please!” and the sound of a gunshot. Steve goes in pursuit of Manning while Adam checks on Friedken, who’s lying on the ground bleeding, Adam calls 911.

 

 

When Steve connects with Manning, he says to Steve that he is not a bad guy. He shows that he is scared, and says he just wanted to see the company pay for what they did to all those families. In an emotional stand, Steve is able to convince him to put down the gun saying he needs him alive for that to happen.

 

Manning complies, telling him he’s sorry, and Steve escorts him outside where HPD takes him into custody. Adam is there, looking at the ambulance that’s taking Friedken to the hospital drive away from the scene.

 

 

Back to HQ, Steve informs the others that they will bring Kevin Randall out of his coma in a couple of days and that Manning will be arraigned in the following days. The other two guys were found a couple of blocks from the building and arrested as well. Odell points out that these are regular people who weren’t born bad and that it shouldn’t work this way. Steve agrees, and says that he spoke to the Governor and the State of Hawaii is going to launch a full investigation into Agrocore. If they’re really responsible, they’ll pay. That seems like a satisfying ending to everyone, or at least the best that can come out of it at that point.

 

 

But Odell has still something to say. “Oh, by the way What? Next time you feel the urge to pick up a pair of clippers, don’t. I mean, this is this is a travesty.” The barber in him is not pleased with Steve’s haircut. He hands him and Lou his business card that says “Barbister”, a hybrid of barber and barrister, and tells him to call him the next time.

 

 

If the guys can finally relax after a long day, Adam’s day isn’t over. He shows up at Jessie’s place and asks her why she hasn’t returned his calls all day. Jessie says she has no idea what’s been going on and that she’s sorry for not getting back to him. “Are you?” Adam inquires as he starts to question her loyalty. “Whose side are you on?” He tells her he’s been listening to the conversations she had with Nemoto and that there’s an 8-minute gap on the tape. A glitch? No. Jessie stopped recording because what they were talking about was personal. Adam is baffled. “You’re sleeping with him?” he asks, and Jesse replies that she can handle herself, and it’s not his concern.

 

 

That doesn’t seem to acquiesce Adam, who gets into his car and starts to speed through the night while his mind replays scenes from his recent ordeal. He breaks down and lets out a scream leading us into another mini-cliffhanger for the short hiatus.

 

 

We would give this one a rating of 9. It was good and it was nice to see that there was only one storyline for a change and that the whole team was on the same mission.  It was nice to see Odell again and of course Eddie is always a plus. To us, however, it seemed like something was off  throughout and the purpose and abilities for those four men to steal the chlorine gas seemed way out there. Steve also seemed to be missing in action for parts he just would not be with this type of threat level to the island. We understand that Alex needs time off and in this case he probably was getting ready for his directing debut, but the areas they used him for maybe could have been interchanged.

With that being said,  strong parts of the episode were Steve’s interaction with Doug while getting the gun away, Adam’s rebel yell, Danny in charge while Steve was taking a siesta at the Governor’s office, the return of Odell, and the nuclear drill at the beginning. In that, Steve and Danny’s characterization was right on and in this case, Danny was right in his observations  Also,  Adam has quickly become one of our favorite characters and he has the most interesting stuff going on right now. As they develop his character deeper, it is really enjoyable to see not only that part but also the relationship he has with Steve. Hope that keeps going strong.

Looking forward, the show is off for two weeks for March Madness, but Alex’s episode airs next on March 30th. We have high hopes for that one and are sure it will be great!