Hawaii Five-0 Recap & Review: Bank Robbers & Blasts From The Past

This episode had a lot of action and emotions running through it. I really enjoyed it overall!

We start out with Junior jogging through town and when he tries to cross the road, he almost gets run down by a car with a very pregnant woman driving it. (And she must have some sort of superpowers as well because the sudden stop doesn't even seem to faze her at all. When I was that pregnant I could barely fit behind the wheel and a sudden stop like that would have been bad.) Junior recognizes her as Layla, his old friend, and he's really surprised to see her. (Was Junior from Hawaii? I can't recall if they've ever said.) They are both really uncomfortable, but trying to cover it up. (You know how that is, with the "great to see you" and "let's catch up sometime" when you don't really mean any of it.) She ends with "hey I'm sorry I almost killed you" and he says "that's all right." For some reason, that made me laugh. Did he mean to say that or was he trying to say something else? (It sort of reminded me of Brian Regan's Take Luck. You can listen to that here if you've never heard it. So funny!)

Cut to Tani on her junkyard-looking rebuilt scooter. She strolls up to a sketchy looking house where a bunch of scary looking dudes are staring at her. She quickly grabs her brother by the ear to get him outside. He's not thrilled and actually threatens to hit her (what a great guy) when she says that vice is moving in on the place and they need to leave. As if they're proving her words, four cars start coming down the road, looking like they mean business. (Somehow I think vice would be at little less obvious, but what do I know?) Tani is literally driving off right in front of them and they just let her go. (Guess they don't care about who is leaving, only who is inside the house. They want the element of surprise maybe?)

Anyway, Steve is at the airport (wearing his blue button-up shirt, thank you wardrobe people) buying leis to welcome Adam and Kono home. Sadly, only Adam arrives. Kono was going to come home, but she got another lead on sex traffickers in Colorado and is running that down. Adam got sick of waiting in hotel rooms and eating out of vending machines, so he decided to come home and have a life.  (Without her I guess.)

(My question is, why didn't he get a job out there? If he's just lounging around hotel rooms all day, is Kono paying for that? Is he still playing computer games?) Adam looks sad, so Steve suggests they stuff their feelings by going to get something to eat. Adam opens up on the way about how hurt he is. After all they've been through, he thought she'd do everything she could to be together.

(He's got to feel especially bad since she just took off without even talking to him. Didn't even give him a second thought!) Steve tries to comfort him, like a good friend would, and says that this thing she's doing, it's more than a job, it's her legacy. Once she's done with it, she'll retire and you two can start making babies. (Aww, Steve would know a thing or two about a woman you love leaving to save the world.) They change the subject and Adam advises Steve not to do a brick and mortar restaurant, but do a food truck instead. Steve nixes that idea because he doesn't want to spend any more time in a moving vehicle with Danny Williams. (I'm there with ya, buddy.) Steve happily tells Adam he got a dog named Eddie. (I love McEddie.)

Junior is resting from his run and he sees four guys in a car without a license plate, going into the bank with large duffels. (They could not have been more obvious that they were up to no good.) He calls McG who whips around and hurries to the scene. The four men go inside the bank and punch out the security guard before telling everyone to get on the floor and asking for the bank manager. (I don't think I'd ever want to be a bank manager. Or the security guard.)

Back at the office, Tani and Lou are watching the video of her taking her brother away minutes before vice got there. He tries to give her advice about letting their loved ones make their own mistakes. She's worried about being fired since she used insider knowledge to save her brother. But, she promised her dad she'd look out for her brother. Lou cuts her some slack and deletes the video. (Tani just comes across as so young and she doesn't make a lot of great decisions. If anyone needs to go back and complete HPD training, it's her.)

McG gets to the bank and does a little recon. He peeks in the window and sees everyone on the floor. He jogs back to the truck to tell Junior to call Lou while he goes in alone. His reasoning is, if the robbers see cops outside, it will be warfare on the streets. (Actually, I bet it would just be more of a hostage situation, but whatevs.) They go down into a parking garage and pull the doors off the back exit of the bank. (Would the robbers not hear that?) Steve tells Junior to wait there for HPD which makes no sense, really, since Junior is a SEAL and trained for situations like this. Junior agrees to the plan, however, and Adam says he'll watch him. Seconds later, Junior throws the plan out the window and is following Steve into the bank with Adam right behind him. Adam looks so rattled trying to watch Junior when he got away, haha! (Also, wasn't Adam shot in a bank before? That would have been interesting if he'd mentioned that or had a reaction.) Steve gives Adam his extra gun and Junior has the one that was in Steve's safe. (Apparently Junior can crack safes.)

They go in and head downstairs to the vault. Right before they get close, there's an explosion. Everyone's okay, but their ears are ringing. They open the vault and find a large hole in the back of it. The robbers have escaped into the sewers with ten million dollars. Steve goes after them. Alone. (Again, why the Lone Ranger act today?) Jerry is going to track him on his cell (underground in a sewer? Wow, that's great phone service.) while Adam and Junior follow him above ground in the truck. Apparently, Steve is moving through those sewers at a crazy fast clip because Adam is driving like it's his first time on the road, going on sidewalks, swerving and yelling at people to watch out, move, and run. (Like they can hear them inside a vehicle as the truck is bearing down on them) But, hey, they're going to make sure they're right on top of Steve in the sewers no matter what.

There is light down there, but Steve is using his flashlight like a beacon, looking under pipes (did he really think they'd be hiding under a pipe?) but that light seems like it would give away his position. Someone starts shooting at him and he fires back and finds his mark. When he approaches, though, he sees it's a cop and immediately calls for help. (What would a random cop be doing down there? Hmm) Adam heads to his position and they load the wounded cop into the back of the truck and race to the hospital. Literally. They're doing triage in the back of the truck while Adam is driving like a man possessed. (I'm honestly surprised they weren't thrown out of the back of the truck.) They get the cop to the hospital and he still has a pulse, but the doctors pretty much get him inside and pronounce him dead in the hall. (They hardly even tried! Intubate the guy! Massage his heart! Crack his chest! Well, I guess the scene must have been running over, so it's a death in the hallway. Sorry Random Cop Guy)

Steve is pretty emotional about it and Alex does a great job here of conveying all the feels with just his facial expressions. Lou and Tani finally catch up to them at the hospital. Tani oddly goes to watch them cover the cop's dead body. Lou goes out to talk to Steve, sitting on a bench. (He has a blue t-shirt on now. I guess they didn't show the wardrobe change.) Lou assures Steve it was an accident. Dark. The cop should have identified himself. Steve won't have any of it. He didn't have a visual and is clearly beating himself up about it, covered in the cop's blood. So sad. He walks away, looking like he needed a hug. *sniff*

Jerry is heading up the Chatting Table. He says the robbers did hardcore advanced planning with the tunnel and they also killed the alarm. But the biggest thing of all was that they knew when the ten million was being deposited in the bank. Junior can't figure out who would deposit that much, but Adam knows. Organized crime! (And he would know all about that. Adam was such an interesting character when he was a bad boy trying to do good. Now he's just, well, Kono's husband.) But Jerry informs everyone that Adam's dad was the OG of OGs. Yakuza. Lou gets annoyed when Junior looks impressed and says they can start a fan club later. But the whole point of the scene was that the robbery was probably an inside job. And to prove it, they have fingerprints in the vault from a lowly teller. The teller ends up in the Blue Room of Doom for questioning, but he isn't talking. Lou even does his thing of getting super up close and personal, but no dice. He's not saying a word!

While Steve and Lou are downstairs, the rest of the team gets the video of the robbers and guess what? The cop that Steve shot was one of the robbers! That's what he was doing down in the sewers all alone, not identifying himself. (Also, why didn't Duke or somebody check the guy out? That seems odd that they wouldn't figure out he wasn't one of them, but okay.) Tani goes down to get Steve so they can show him the video. The team figures out the robbers dressed up as cops to blend in during their escape. Steve is obviously relieved at this turn of events. (Honestly, Alex did such a great job with all the emotions in this ep).

But just as they're talking about the robbers dressed as cops, they cut to a cop bypassing security in the Palace. That can't be good.

Steve and Lou make plans to get the teller to talk, but when they go back down to the Blue Room of Doom, he's dead. (They have terrible security there. Seriously. How many times has the Palace been breached now?)

Steve and Lou run through the Palace, guns drawn, sealing it just as the killer exits. Steve figures it out pretty quick and they get the doors open and run outside to see the cop walking away. Apparently they can just feel that he's not a real cop and run after him. The guy almost makes it to the getaway car, but his buddies fire at Steve and Lou so he can jump in the car safely. Adam, Tani, Jerry, and Junior run to the window to witness the firefight and decide to go down and "help." But Steve has it under control and fires at the car and hits the driver. (Why didn't the guys in the car shoot back? Out of ammo? Death wish? For hardcore robbery planners, they didn't plan the getaway very well) The car spectacularly crashes and overturns. Lou pulls out the survivors (telling them they're not even hurt, haha) and the trunk flies open spilling out the ten million dollars. Junior is all smiles at how easy the case was, but Lou tells him it doesn't usually happen that way with the bad guys coming to them. (That Lou, always so practical and real.) (We also find out in this ep that Junior is skating on thin ice at the academy. I thought he was the greatest thing the instructors had seen! What happened, man? Oh well. I guess him and Tani would have something in common if he gets kicked out, too.)

With the case over, you would think everyone would go home, but Tani is at the office late, thinking about who deposited the money at the bank. She finds out that the guy who executed the bank teller had been in Five-0 custody before. That's how he knew where the Blue Room of Doom was. (Well, I'm glad we cleared that up. But who deposited the money? We'll work on that tomorrow.) Lou tells her to go home, but she wants to talk a bit more. She knows she's made some missteps with the Aaron Wright thing and her brother. It's not going to happen again, according to her, but Lou says that it will. She's new. She doesn't want to let the guys down, and Lou assures her that McG and the team have faith in her and she should cheer up. (I know she's new and all, but I wish she'd been shown to have a bit more in the way of good instincts, you know?)

McG drops off Adam and tells him he appreciated him having his back today. They look at the bloody mess of clothes and leis in the back and Adam doesn't want it. McG actually says he might wash the blood out and WEAR IT to a nice dinner. (I'm sorry, but even the thought of that is nasty.)

Adam looks all sad as he stares at his house. McG picks up on that and tells him he's got his number if he needs to get a drink or hang out, he should just give him a call. (Aww, he's such a good friend.)  He gets back in the truck and Tani calls to say they need to talk, that something happened this morning that he needs to know about. So hopefully, she's coming clean with him about her brother.

And to end the episode with the other newbie backstory, we're back at McG's house where Junior is looking at his prom video of him and Layla, the pregnant lady he saw at the beginning of the ep. They look young and in love and it's right before he goes to boot camp. They're laughing and joking around about "Hooyah as in hooyah gonna marry?" Junior looks sad and shuts it off. Poor Junior.

So, lots of action, lots of unnecessary (but still awesome) crazy car scenes, with some great emotional moments, and McG in blue. All the things I like.

Did you watch? What did you think?