Hawaii Five-O Recap & Review: Adam and His Task Force of One Hit a Snag

This episode was directed by Alex O'Loughlin and I hope we see more directing on his part in the future!

We start out back in New Jersey in 1999 with a scene of a man abusing a woman. The cops come to the door to check out a noise complaint. Young Detective Danny is there! It's easy to see that the woman is bruised and scared so Danny talks to her alone inside while the husband stays outside with Danny's partner. Strangely, one of the first things Danny does is try to reach out and touch the beaten woman's shoulder. She flinches away. He tries to reassure her that she has options and he can help her if she's straight with him. All she has to do is give a statement about what happened to her eye. (Uh huh. Like it's so easy when your abuser is right outside the door.) She tells him to leave and he gives her his card and says to call if she wants help. Back to present day and we see Danny approaching the formerly abused wife. Her name is Brooke and they chat about how it was her husband Ray that shot Danny a few weeks back when the team was in isolation. The bullet missed his heart by a mere 3 mm.

We are yanked out of that scene with a choppy cut where Adam is being pulled over and made to lie on the ground. The police open his trunk and we see Hidecki's body. (Uh oh. Adam what did you do?)

TimeFillerTunior is coming in for a meeting with Steve and they hear a guitar playing. Frank Bama is singing in Steve's office, while Steve accompanies him on a guitar. Steve introduces him to Tunior and says that Frank is the only person who can go shoeless in his office. He's an old friend of Five-O who is on vacay and just wanted to drop off a belated birthday gift for Steve (the guitar). (Aww. At least someone remembered Steve's birthday.) Frank leaves (there really was no point to having him in the show, we don't see him again this ep.) Steve gives Junior an assignment to work as a beat cop for a shift. He has to wear the uniform and try to see things from a cop's point of view. Junior rightfully asks why he's the only one who has to do honorable work and not Tani, which is a good point because Tani could use a lot more training and perspective. Steve decides she can work a beat, too.

Steve goes to see Adam in custody. The FBI guy is practically foaming that they caught Adam with the body after an anonymous tip. (Why are all FBI guys portrayed as jerks?) He won't look at any other reason for Adam being set up, but he does give Steve five minutes. Steve and Adam quickly chat about who could have outted him and set him up. He tells Steve about Jessie not being trustworthy anymore and how things haven't been going great with her.

TimeFillerTunior is watching a lady throw out a bunch of her man's stuff and they go to break it up. After talking to them separately, Tani reports that the guy didn't come home last night and was at a fancy hotel, so, duh, he must be a cheater. Junior is chill and wants to let them sort it out since there's nothing illegal about that. Tani goes off on Junior about mansplaining stuff to her, (Oy!) but when he can get a word in, he tells her the guy was setting up the room for their romantic weekend to celebrate the wife's birthday. The couple is passionately kissing now, so TimeFillerTunior leaves.

The FBI guy is enjoying browbeating Adam and throwing down how they knew Hidecki took him into the woods and beat him. Motive, of course for Adam killing the guy. Adam is trying to be patient and explain that Hidecki was a person of interest in his investigation and his TaskForceOfOne was committed to finding who killed the agent and his family. He even had a confidential informant and everything! FBIGuy is pretty skeptical and says to bring in his CI to back him up. Adam refuses and gets threatened with a murder conviction.

Brooke is with Danny at the morgue identifying her former? husband Ray, the guy who shot Danny. (Since he'd been in prison, shouldn't his fingerprints be in the system? Why wasn't that the first thing that popped?) She's glad Ray's gone and Danny reassures her that the guy underestimated how resilient she was. We flashback to Danny knocking on her door at a hotel. (I guess she must have changed her mind and asked for Danny's help after all.) She picks up scissors to answer the door and is scared her husband will find out where she is. This poor woman! Danny tells her that a women's shelter spot is opening up for her until she figures things out. He brought her food and they're smiling and she invites him in. Hmmm.

McGrover decided their best bet would be to track down Jessie, so they go to Nemoto's house and find his body. He was killed in the shower but they only show a large, blood-spattered blast hole in the curtain. Still, ew.

Back to a New Jersey flashback, where we see Danny driving up and finding Brooke being loaded into an ambulance, all beat up. The husband found her and knows she's seeing someone, but she didn't tell him about her and Danny. (Um, what? Danny is involved with a vulnerable, abused, married woman? How would anyone think that was a good idea?) Danny tells her I'll take care of this and she'll be okay. Back to present day, Danny and Brooke are on a beach getting ready to spread Ray's ashes. (Well, that was an extremely fast cremation. They just barely ID'd the body!) Danny tells Brooke it should be about her, not him. (Doesn't Ray have a family? Mother? Father? Weird that his abused, probably ex-wife, is the one doing this.) On that note, she takes out the plastic bag of ashes and throws them in the air, then wants to go for a drink.

Back to TimeFillerTunior who are now watching a graffiti artist paint over his work. They chat about how Tani got into a lot of trouble with her brother and somewhere along the line realized she was setting the wrong example so she decided to set the right one and worked to become a cop. She's overbearing to the graffiti guy and demands he paint with crisp edges. Yawn.

Unfortunately, the ballistics don't match Hidecki and Nemoto murders, but they've gotta be connected somehow, right? Before McGrover can kick that around further, HPD gets eyes on Jessie's car. McGrover chase her down and she runs through a building with Steve chasing her on foot. She seems like she's gotten away, but Steve clotheslines her and they take her in to the Blue Room of Doom.

Back to New Jersey Flashback with Danny outside a bar, watching Ray head to his car, sort of staggering. Danny puts his gun away and calls in a DUI before he confronts him. Ray is pretty annoyed to see Danny, but Danny says he's there because Ray put his wife in the hospital tonight. Ray gets in his face and starts to walk away, so Danny taunts him with the fact that his wife is sleeping with someone else, and no matter how bad he beat her, she wouldn't tell, but hey, it's HIM! (*shakes head* Seriously? Danny is sleeping with a victim of domestic violence whose case he is working, not to mention a woman who just barely got away from her psycho husband?) Danny provokes him with more taunts of supposedly being more of a man than Ray and Ray starts beating him. The cops called for the DUI come along and break it up and take Ray to jail. Back to present day, Danny is now getting a drink with Brooke, thinking of that night and how it changed the course of Ray's life and he never got over it. Meanwhile, Danny never thought about it again. (Really? Not even once?) The takeaway is that two people experience the same moment differently.

McGrover has Jessie in the chair asking why she ran, but she looks at them like they're idiots. Hello, Hidecki is dead and Adam isn't answering her calls, not to mention, Nemoto is iced, too. Grover gets close to her face and tells her they know she was sleeping with Nemoto and Adam thinks she isn't trustworthy. (Way to throw Adam under the bus.) She wants to talk to Adam, but they tell her he was arrested earlier on suspicion of murdering Hidecki. She looks shocked. They're talking about how no one could have known about the TaskForceOfOne except her and Jessie clues in that they think she gave him up. She tells them that Hidecki had gone to ground and was paranoid. She was meeting him at a construction site with food, but the place was a bloodbath. McGrover has her take them there, but it's empty, including the trailer where Hidecki was killed. Someone stole the crime scene trailer and if they're going to get Adam out they gotta find it. Fast.

TimeFillerTunior is arguing over who should be driving. They see a kid on a shopping cart all alone when he should be in school, so they go talk to him. He says his mom is dead and his dad is sick a lot, so they head to his house. Yawn. The place is a mess, garbage everywhere, dad is on kitchen floor passed out so Junior breaks in and get him up. They're going to get the dad sorted out at the station and the kid goes to auntie Leah's. He gets to say goodbye to his dad, without any cuffs thanks to Junior. When TimeFillerTunior talk about it, Tani thinks that's awesome how he didn't cuff the dad in front of the kid and Junior says he can't remember all the times his dad got arrested, but he remembers the first time in cuffs. Tani is wrapping up her feelings, saying she didn't enjoy today, but it wasn't the worst day. They see an old lady crossing street dropping stuff all over the road, so Junior goes to help her and she maces him.

Steve has an old buddy patch them into the satellite system (like Cath used to, sniff). They see the trailer being hauled away and zero in on the logo of the truck. (Newbie criminals, I guess, because they left the logo on.) They go there and find the cleaners and there's a short gunfight. And it's sort of ironic that they're cleaning up a murder scene that becomes a murder scene. The trailer is already done and evidence destroyed. Is it too late for Adam?

Brooke is back at her hotel room and she's hugging Danny goodbye. He leaves, but pauses in the hall and she pauses in her hotel room door, but finally closes it. He flashes back to New Jersey and Brooke outside her house working in the garden. He tells her Ray is going away for a long time. She's going to sell her house and maybe go to the west coast for a fresh start. She thanks him and says he saved her life. He goes all, aw shucks and says he was just doing his job and she says, most of the time. *wink wink* (Ew.)  He drives away thinking about his sexytimes with Brooke (you know, before he forgets all about Brooke and Ray) and is rear-ended by his future wife Rachel. It was a cute scene, actually, where he asks for her number and he'll forget this ever happened. Back to present day. Danny is coming to pick up Charlie and Rachel invites him in to finish reading him a Pete the Cat book.

Junior is treated in an ambulance after his macing, his poor eyes are swollen and red. Tani is going to tell everyone, (because that's not junior high-ish at all) starting with McG and Junior can't buy her silence because the golden child being owned by a grandma is priceless.

Adam is finally free to go because the cleaners destroying evidence while Adam was in custody helped prove his case? (Yeah. Let's just go with that.) Steve takes him for a chat. Jessie didn't set him up after all. But the autopsy on Hidecki found foreign DNA on him that had a familial match to Adam. It's someone who is female and between 35 to 40 years old. So . . . Adam has a half-sister. And somehow she's involved in everything going on. Dun, dun, dun.

Well, they're still cramming in three storylines and not really doing justice to any of them. I hope they go back to just an A and B storyline soon with a lot more Steve!

What did you think? Did you watch?